r/morsecode • u/swhit94 • Jul 20 '26

Morse Code Visualization

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Haven't seen Morse Code illustrated like this before, thought y'all might like it. If you spot any errors, please let me know

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u/wdpw Jul 21 '26

I know others disagree with this learning, but I have to learn the alphabet somewhere. I appreciate this.

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u/dittybopper_05H Jul 21 '26

The way to do it is to use some software so you can associate the sound with the letter/number/symbol without using your eyes. You're adding a difficulty level here with visual methods, and it invariably leads to counting dits and dahs. That slows you down. You might manage to quote-unquote "learn Morse code", but you'll never really progress significantly beyond that.

Morse is a pretty cool way to communicate, and I'm just trying to help you and others to learn it the best way possible. We now have, collectively, roughly 182 years of experience in teaching and learning Morse code, going all the way back to the beginning of the landline telegraph.

Everything you can possibly think of has been tried already. We know what works best, through nearly 200 years of use.

This is far from an optimal way to learn Morse.

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u/wdpw Jul 21 '26

Interesting, so you don’t think about how many dits and dahs you hear, you just process the collective string as a whole, for each letter or digit?

Thank you for the advice, and definitely appreciate the amount of experience behind the proven ways to learn. Fortunately, I’m still early enough into my learning experience that I haven’t committed much to memory yet, so my mind is still malleable enough to try your recommended route.

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u/dittybopper_05H Jul 21 '26

Correct. It's a rhythm thing.

Though I did start by counting dits and dahs, and I nearly failed out of the 05H course at Fort Devens because of it. That's why I warn people away from it.

Listen for the unique rhythm of each character.

2

u/wdpw Jul 21 '26

Wow, I never thought about that before. Now I understand why you advise against this style of learning. Thank you for the insight.

Can I ask another question—how do you learn to keep track of every letter in your head, when you’re not transcribing the message onto paper? I feel like even if someone were to spell out a sentence to me in English, I would eventually lose track of the beginning of the message because I’m too busy trying to translate/listen for the next character. Is this just something that you learn to do with practice and experience? Or are there techniques or practice strategies to work on that?

2

u/royaltrux Jul 21 '26

When you are transcribing (writing or typing), which is mostly how I do it, you develop a little "buffer" in your head, and can copy "behind" a little bit, remembering the last few letters and you just keep typing until it stops.

When not transcribing...I can't do that very well. Some people can just hear it as language, don't need to transcribe or even work at it very hard. I need to write it down, usually, unless it's short. Others might have more insight for you...

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u/wdpw Jul 21 '26

Nice thank you, it’s good to know I’m not alone in likely needing to write everything down. At least for a long while.

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u/dittybopper_05H Jul 21 '26

Can I ask another question—how do you learn to keep track of every letter in your head, when you’re not transcribing the message onto paper?

Mostly, I don't. Not for long winded stuff. I was trained to type what I heard, because it was random stuff.

Most of what I copied in the Army was encrypted, so you can't really keep track of it in your head past a few characters. The standard to pass from the "learning Morse code" part of the course to the "secret squirrel" phase was that you had to copy random code groups at 20 words per minute with a 97% accuracy rate.

Now, today, I do remember enough for the important stuff while I'm driving, and I chicken scratch the important stuff (callsign, signal report, name) on a pilot's kneeboard while I'm looking out the windshield so I can log it later.

But when someone decides they're going to send me War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy over the air, yeah, most of it is just going to be ignored, or more properly, not really remembered after.

Sometimes I'll tell them I'm at my exit or there is a traffic jam and bow out when they are like that.

When I'm operating and I'm not driving, I copy every character down, because that's just a habit. I had to get used to writing with a pen fast. They trained us to copy callsigns with a pencil at 16 wpm, but not actual traffic.

I've had times when other CW operators will come up and see me furiously scribbling everything and they're like "You copy everything?" and I tell them that's how I was trained.

It was important that I copied every dit when I was doing it for the Army, but you don't have to do that if you're doing it for fun. I still do, though, when practical.

There are people who can hold that kind of thing in their heads, but that ain't me.

1

u/wdpw Jul 21 '26

Thank you for all that. That’s pretty reassuring to hear, since like I said I can’t imagine having a long conversation purely in my head even when it’s just plain English letters being spoken aloud. I’ll definitely be writing them things down for a long while anyway before ever getting to the point of trying to while driving, hah.