I do most of my CW training while working to and from work on my morning  commute.  So, I’m not writing stuff down at all, just listening to the Morse Trainer app on my phone.    Here are a few reflective notes on what I’m up to and what I’m learning about myself while doing CW training like this.

As I wrote here I’ve been training with a list of common QSO words.  Seem to have them pretty much down at 18 wpm.   18 wpm seems to be the max that the Morse Trainer app can handle, so I fix it there with no extra symbol spacing.   I can imagine there is going to be a bit of trouble getting me beyond 18 wpm.. But that would be a great problem to have 🙂

So, after the random QSO words list, I’ve gone back to training random letter and number groups, starting at 2 symbols together and planning on going up to 3, 4 and then 5.   So I’ve started with ‘AB’ or ‘C5’ or whatever the randomiser throws up.  This is going ok, except I can feel slowness/weakness with some numbers (2,3, 7 and 8) and letters like G, W, F, Q, Y.

This morning, I thought I’d have a go at the numbers. Started with random 2 digit numbers at 18wpm. I feel pretty ok with them, especially after a little practice.  Feels like about 90% correct on those so have stepped up to 3 digits now, intending to go up to 4 and 5 digit numbers and keep on those until basically perfect.   And after that I need to go back to the harder letters, or maybe even all-letter or letter-number groups up to 5 long at 18 wpm.

It feels like the key thing in here is noticing when my recognition is weak, so that takes awareness and that gentle kindness and experimentation to see what I can do.    I’m looking forward to real CW QSOs and want to be able to QSO before around the end of September.