Hi everyone,

as I wrote a few days ago, 2015 will be my personal CW year 🙂

I want to become really proficient in CW and to get better and better I’m trying to find some good training. My personal best choice goes to LCWO.net website. Really well done and with a lot of interesting tools to learn and improve your CW skills.

My preferred tool so far is the “Morse Machine“. The tool is not a LCWO original idea but it comes from Ward K9OX.

Let me use Ward original words to describe what the Morse Machine is:

“This program teaches you to receive Morse code. It starts with a few letters and adds more when it sees that you are ready. This is the easiest way to learn code because the computer thinks about the practice you need next instead of wasting your time with stuff you already know or confusing you with stuff that you don’t.”

Immediately I thought that it would be cool (and useful) to have the Morse Machine running on Android phones/tablet as well and I just started the development of the app.

The app works by starting with the two first letters of the Koch method: K and M. For each letter you have a column showing how many times you have to guess that letter to consider it “learned”.

It plays the letters randomly and you have to say which one has been played. If the answer is right, the column goes down by 1. If it’s wrong the column value is increased. And so on, until the first two letters are considered “learned”. Once this happens it adds the 3rd letter. It plays the new letter more frequently than the previous ones. When also the third letter is learned, the app adds the 4th and so on.

The status will be saved so that you can stop and start from where you left the next time.

I personally love it and found it one of the best ways to learn and improve your CW.

It should be quite easy to develop and I’m already at a good point.

Here are a couple of screenshot of the initial development.

Very simple but it’s almost all it’s needed for the Morse Machine 🙂

As usual I’ll keep you updated on the development of this new app!

72/73 Andrea IU4APC

Update:

I know not everyone knows well how Morse code is born and how it developed over time.
If you are interested in it, one place I’d like you to point to is a page developed by Corrine Jackson where you can have a brief overview of it and lots of selected links if you are more curious about it.

The link is: https://www.emissary.ai/telegraph-morse-code-text/

I’d like to thank Corrine spending time researching and writing about it and really hope she and her friends start to learn Morse code as it’s a cool and peculiar skill to have 🙂