Sound library

Why no files are stored here

A stored audio file at 20 WPM is exactly one speed and exactly one pitch. Practice at 22 and you will not find it; need a lower pitch and neither. Thirty speeds times three pitches times nine sets would be eight hundred files - and the right one still would not be among them.

So every set here comes into being the moment you hear it. The WAV comes from the same schedule: there is no version that sounds different from what you heard.

The nine sets

• Alphabet, numbers, punctuation - the basic stock, in fixed order. For comparing, not for learning: the trainer is for that, because it shuffles.
• Q codes and CW abbreviations - what actually occurs on the air, as word shapes rather than character by character.
• Callsigns - the hardest exercise with the smallest stock, because nothing is predictable.
• Common words - the same fourteen that turn up in every English text. Recognize them by sound and you stop hearing characters and start hearing words.
• A whole QSO - five lines, from CQ to SK.
• Distress calls - SOS, CQD and MAYDAY, for completeness.

Two speeds, one purpose

Character speed sets how fast a single character sounds. Effective speed sets how much air there is between them. Set both the same and it is ordinary Morse; set the effective one lower and it is Farnsworth.

For learning, Farnsworth is the better road: the characters sound from the start the way they will sound later, and the pause does the adjusting. Practice everything slowly instead and you learn a sound you will never hear again on the air. More on the page about timing and speed.