Daily Morse Challenge

Why daily and not as often as you like

A skill that rests on hearing grows with repetition, not with the length of a sitting. Ten minutes on six days beat an hour on one - that holds for Morse as for anything else you learn by ear.

One attempt a day has a second reason: it is the only way the score means anything. If you could enter twenty times, you would eventually submit your best run, and the ranking would list stamina rather than skill.

What comes up today

Six categories take turns, one per day:

• Single characters - letters and digits, the foundation.
• Words - short, common words as a whole rather than character by character.
• Callsigns - prefix, district digit, suffix; the first thing you hear on the band.
• Number groups - three to five digits, the way they are passed on the air.
• Q codes - QRL, QTH, QSB and the rest.
• CW abbreviations - AGN, PSE, TNX, what actually goes out on the bands.

Six categories and seven weekdays: the order shifts every week. That is deliberate. With seven, "numbers on Sunday" would be a fixed rule, and anyone who dislikes numbers would have one dead day a week.

The speed is not yours to set

Character speed is fixed at 20 WPM. The spacing between characters drifts with the day between 10 and 18 WPM effective - an easy day here, a hard one there, and both hit everyone alike.

That the characters themselves always come at 20 WPM is the Farnsworth principle and no accident: a slowly sent E sounds different from a fast one, and whoever learns the slow one will not recognize the fast one later. So what you practice is the final sound, and what is adjusted is the pause between.

For free practice at your own speed there is the trainer. Nothing counts there, and that is exactly its purpose.

How it is scored

A hundred points per correct item, and nothing else. Time does not enter the score; it only breaks a tie - otherwise fast guessing would be a strategy.

The scoring happens on the server, not in the browser. The browser sends what was typed; the points come into being where nobody can adjust them. Two limits come with it:

• A submission cannot be faster than the audio can possibly play. That limit is hard - sound in your own machine cannot be hurried.
• Between the moment the server handed out the task and the submission, enough time must have passed on the server clock. That clock is not in your browser.

What breaks these rules is stored but not ranked. And it should be said plainly: whoever hears the task also has it sitting in the memory of their browser. That cannot be changed as long as the audio is made there. A contest of this kind is reasonably fair, not tamper-proof.

What the ranking shows

A nickname, a country, a score, a time. Nothing more - no real name, no address, no timestamp, no indication of how much anyone has practiced.

The country is the one you enter yourself in your account, and it may stay empty. It is never derived from your IP address; inferring an origin from the address would be processing nobody expects.

Beyond a single day the scores are summed, not averaged. Whoever turns up on five days stands ahead of whoever reached the same on one. An average would be the other defensible choice, but it rewards staying away on bad days - and that is precisely the behavior a daily task should not produce.

Four classes, and why they exist

A single leaderboard for everyone is not a leaderboard. Somebody starting at 12 WPM lands behind people who have been operating for thirty years, and stops after a week. So there are four classes - Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert - and they run separately.

The class sets the speed, not just the list. Beginner sends 18 WPM characters with wide gaps and 15 tasks; Expert sends 32 WPM with tight gaps and 30. The characters stay fast even for beginners: that is the core of the Koch method, and it is not given up just because this is a competition. Learn characters slowly and you will not recognise them on the air.

Every class hears the same tasks in the same order on a given day - the higher classes simply get more of them. Four separate task lists would have made four different days out of one.

The class is fixed when you press start. Not at submission. Otherwise you could listen at beginner speed and file the result under Expert.

Nobody is forced upwards. If you sit at the top of your class over several attempts - three of your last five above 95% - you are told that the next one would suit you. A single good day is not ability, and forced promotion would reliably catch the wrong person: someone who had three good days, and never the one who is actually gaming it, because they would simply get one answer wrong on purpose.

This is the Morse-Code.info World Morse Challenge. Not a world championship - no association recognises it, and calling it one would be a presumption.