Missions
Not a practice text but a situation: something comes in, and you have to do something with it.
The difference from a drill is context. The Koch trainer sends single characters, dictation sends five-character groups with no meaning. Here a message arrives that means something, and the question is not "what was there" but "what do you do with it".
That changes the listening. Knowing that a callsign is about to come makes you hear differently from someone merely collecting characters - and it is exactly that expectation which makes an operator fast. On the air, almost everything sits in a predictable place.
The two missions
Night shift at the coastal station: a distress call comes in. You take the callsign, the position and the number of people, acknowledge receipt and pass the report on. Five steps, about eight minutes.
Relaying a storm warning: the weather service sends a warning to be passed to all ships in the area. Four steps, about six minutes - shorter, but with one line that arrives written rather than heard.
Why a mistake does not throw you back
A wrong attempt does not end the mission. The step stays the same, the message can be heard again, and after two wrong attempts a hint appears by itself.
That is deliberate: a chain that restarts on every error does not get harder, only longer. Someone stuck on step four then practices the first three for the tenth time - and learns nothing at exactly the place where it would be needed.
Wrong attempts are counted all the same. They appear in the summary at the end and the score falls with them - but never below a third.
The wording is real
QTH for position, POB for persons on board, RRR for "received", QSL for "acknowledged", K for "over": these are not invented abbreviations but the working language of maritime radio as it was used until 1999.
To look them up, the Q codes and the CW abbreviations are there as lists. And if the missions leave you wanting a whole conversation, your first CW QSO rebuilds the same sequence as a radio contact.
Frequently asked questions
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How hard is it?
The messages come at the speed you set and can be repeated as often as you like. The difficulty is not the listening but the assembling at the end - that is where everything you took down in the earlier steps comes together.
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Do I have to type exactly?
No. Case, punctuation and double spaces are ignored. Letters and digits are what is compared.
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Will there be more missions?
Probably. The missions sit in their own data file with steps, expected answers and hints; adding one is a matter of text, not of code.