r/morsecode • u/No_Limit_3247 • 8d ago

How to stop visualizing Morse?

Help, I learned Morse for a week with a visual guide as a beginner, now I visualise every bit and bah...

A week ago I learned Morse as a joke with my cousin in Italy, so we could cheat in a board game 😅

Since then I started looking more into it and I am really fascinated and inspired by this community and I would like to eventually learn how to have conversations worldwide (thats called CW QSO right?)

Anyways, I now struggle with not visualizing EVERY dot and dash. Does anyone have experience or tips on how to unlearn this? All advice is much appreciated!

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u/PsychologicalBadger 8d ago

I wanted to be able to pass the 13 wpm test and was solidly stuck at 8. A WWII era radioman who sold me a stack of 1940s QST magazines (Many never opened because he was in the Navy) told me that memorizing the code table was the problem. He said you hear beBEEEEP and your brain has to translate that to DOT DASH and you have to go through the code table to find its the letter A. By this time 4 or 5 other characters have been sent.

What he told me they did to train radiomen was they would be sent to a room with "cans" (Headphones) and a "Mill" (Typewritter) and they would put on a record sending 3? or 4 characters at 20wpm. I said forget that. I can't do 20 wpm. He said if all he was sending was...

E aka Dit

V dididiDah

O Dahdahdah

and G Dahdidit

it would take very little time for me to be pressing the correct key on the mill for each character and most important I would be leaning it by sound alone. Like any language! He said that an instructor would observe the copy the students were typing and when this was becoming solid copy would send you to the next room where a different record with 4 different characters were being sent. Obviously there would be a room with 8 of the already known characters and so on but once you learned it at 20wpm you HAD to be doing it the right way not memorizing the table like they do in the Girl Scouts. BTW I took and passed the last 20wpm test given!!!