Following one station among many
A pileup drills a moment. This is about endurance: everyone transmits continuously, and you stay on one.
Ready.
In a pileup many stations call at once and then fall silent. You have to catch a moment. Here it is different and harder: everyone transmits continuously, and the task is to follow one of them the whole way.
That matches what really happens on a busy band - and what happens in a room full of conversations when you listen to one. The term for it is the cocktail party effect, and it works at all because hearing separates sources by pitch, direction and rhythm.
Why the target runs alone first
Because you cannot follow a station you have never heard. First yours runs alone - you learn its pitch, its speed and its fist. Only then do the others join.
Without that step the exercise would not be hard but impossible: among five simultaneous stations none stands out until you know which one is meant. It is exactly how it is done on the air - you memorise a tone and stay with it.
The 60 hertz limit
Stations are separated in the head mainly by pitch. How far apart they have to be is not a matter of opinion: below roughly 60 hertz two tones merge for most ears into a single beating sound. From there on, only different sending speeds help.
The levels are built on that. Easy uses 320 hertz of spacing, a good octave and effortless to separate. Extreme uses 55 - below the limit, and the tool says so after scoring. Getting it right there is not better hearing but recognizing the fist.
That is why tight rounds count for more: 300 hertz of spacing gives a hundred points, 60 hertz five times that.
Slipping to the neighbor
The commonest failure is not understanding nothing but understanding something else. You follow a station, lose it for a moment in a gap and latch onto the next - which is also sending sensible text, which is why it goes unnoticed.
So the result does not merely say right or wrong but which station you actually copied and how far away it was. Slipping regularly onto the immediate neighbor is a different problem from landing anywhere: the first is about concentration, the second about speed.
Frequently asked questions
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How many rounds make sense?
Five to ten in one go. The exercise is more tiring than it looks - concentrated tracking of one source among several wears you out quickly, and past a certain point you are only measuring fatigue.
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Why do the stations send at different speeds?
Because they do on the air, and because speed is the second feature besides pitch by which a station is recognized. On the easy levels the speed is equal - there pitch alone should carry it.
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Can I separate them better with headphones?
Yes, markedly. Without headphones the spatial separation is gone and only pitch remains. All stations here come from the same direction, the center - deliberately, because that is how it is in a receiver.