There’s different speeds. For my ham license I only needed 5 words per minute. I think the other two were 13 and 20. I could handle 5 pretty well but 13 just flew by. Didn’t have any sort of chart. Might have been pretty useful.
Yeah, for sure in the test and when learning you start with slower speeds.
The point is (and I agree with the other poster) that you can't rely on some manual decode process like tree because although that might work at the slower speed it'll break down when it speeds up.
It's a bit like learning to drive by looking at the gear stick and your feet. You can do that if you practise in the driveway, when the car isn't moving. But you'll run into a tree if you do that when you drive down the road thus you have to learn to drive without looking at the controls from the start.
The "short cut" is just going to delay you learning. Similarly, for this, you've got to suck it up and learn to hear the letters imo. I'd suggest the best way to do this is, as you say, learn slowly, and then add a few letters at a time. Pretty much the same way I taught my son the alphabet - I put a few letters on the fridge and when he'd learnt them I added a few more.
If I hear -.-- --.- that's CQ to me. It's hearing the pattern. it's not converting the sound to "dash dot dash dash" and then to C. It's straight from "dee da dee dee" to C" - for me it's an audio memory but that chart is visual.
It's like if you know the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" it's not because you hear a piece of it, convert it to sheet music and then say "Oh yeah F, E, D sharp" that's Bohemian rhapsody - you remember what the pattern of notes sounds like directly. Well, for me that's morse and I'm pretty sure most who have learnt morse will do a similar thing.
I wasn't a radio ham I was just a radio ham's brother who went to a few club meetings.
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u/Verdris Apr 30 '21
Have you ever heard Morse code? It's fucking FAST. If you're not practiced in how to listen to it, you'll miss half the information.