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Simulating on-air work

Between "I know the characters" and "I dare to go on the air" there is a gap. This is where it gets closed.

Knowing the characters is a long way from holding a contact. On the band everything arrives at once: an unfamiliar speed, a fist that differs from the textbook, noise, a second station right next to yours - and your reply has to be ready before the other side moves on. Those conditions can be rebuilt, and unlike the real band, nobody here is listening.

Every simulation runs in the browser and generates its own signals. No recordings, no fixed speed: what you hear is produced at the speed and with the interference you set.

The order

Start with your first CW QSO: a clean contact without interference, following the fixed sequence every contact has. Then band conditions - the same contact, but with noise, fading and a neighbor. That is the step where most people notice how much they owed to silence.

Pileup and contest are the hard part. In a pileup up to thirty stations call at once, and the task is not to understand all of them but to get one. The contest adds time pressure and a fixed exchange.

And for playing

Three games sit alongside, and they are not merely decoration. The sound version of memory drills exactly what copying depends on: holding a tone instead of reading a picture. Simon shows how many characters your working memory carries in one go - usually seven to twelve, and that is the point where writing things down becomes necessary.

The reaction test is the most sober of them: it measures in milliseconds how long you take from the end of a character to recognizing it, and works out the speed you can really carry. If you want to know why things fall apart at 20 WPM, that is where the number is.

Simulate

First CW QSO A station calls, you copy what you hear. The whole shape of an amateur radio contact, generated in your browser, with noise, fading and a human hand.
Band conditions Hear the same message under eight conditions: weak signal, fading, QRN, QRM, frequency offset, crowded band. Directly comparable, side by side.
Pileup Two to thirty stations calling at once, each on its own pitch. Practice selective listening and callsign copying, including DX split operation.
Contest Practice contest operating: copy callsign and serial number against the clock, with rate and score. A wrong contact counts minus one.
Telegraph Office Write a telegram and watch the price change as you type. The real word counting rules: punctuation costs a word, "10" costs two, "ten" costs one.
Ship Radio Room Several messages arrive at once. Distress, urgency, safety, routine - put them in the order a ship's radio officer had to, and see where it goes wrong.
DX Expedition Sit on the rare side of the pile-up. Pick callsigns out of the noise, keep the log in your head, and watch your rate. Duplicates cost you time.
Railroad Telegraph Take a train order in American Morse, copy it, and repeat it back word for word. Only then does the dispatcher make it complete - as it was done.
Signal Hunt A named station is somewhere on 40 kHz of band. Tune until you hear it, then narrow the filter until it stands alone. Direction hints, no numbers.
Radio Station Tune across a band, find out who is on it, and write each call sign into your log. S meter, filters and a running log, without any radio.

Games

Memory A memory game for the Morse alphabet: character and code, sound and letter, or Q code and meaning. Four to eight pairs, at any speed, free.
Simon The Simon game in Morse code: hear a sequence and type it back, one character longer each round. With characters, or with dots and dashes only.
Reaction test Measures the time from the end of a Morse character to recognition, in milliseconds, per character. From that follows the speed you can really carry.
Blind copy The drill where the input field stays locked while sending. Only afterwards do you write down what stuck - five to fifteen groups, at any speed.
Head copy Head copy: a whole sentence, sent faster than you could write. Scored by words, because in comprehension the word counts, not the letter.
Dictation Hear text, copy it, get it analyzed: character rate, missing and extra characters, and above all the pairs you keep mixing up.
Build the signal Assemble a character yourself: dot is one unit, dash three, gaps one, three and seven. The blocks are as wide as they are long.
Rhythm lab S or H? U or V? The lab plays two characters that differ by exactly one step - and measures whether you hear the difference instead of counting it.
Telegraph sounder No beeps but clicks: the down-stroke and return of an armature. With the American code of 1844, three builds, and the text read back from the clicks.
Light Morse Four lamp types compared: LED, torch bulb, large signal lamp and shutter. With a drawn brightness curve and a computed speed limit.
Interference Two to five stations transmit at once on closely spaced pitches. You learn one first and then follow it through the rest.
Missions Two missions of six to eight minutes: a distress call at a coastal station and a storm warning to relay. Listen, copy, answer correctly.
Escape room Two escape rooms: light, sound and written characters each lead to part of the answer, and at the end everything comes together.

Compete

Daily Challenge Fifteen items by ear every day, the same worldwide, with a ranking by country and period. Watch without an account, take part with a device key.
Account Everything on this site works without an account. A device key is needed only to take part in the ranking - a random number in your browser, nothing more.
CW Operator Challenge One QSO passage, played once, then five questions: call sign, RST, name, QTH and what they wanted. Tests comprehension, not character recognition.

Measure instead of guess

Judging your own level is hard, because you do not notice the places where you guessed. The daily challenge gives everyone the same fifteen tasks each day - same order, same speed, worldwide. That lets you hold your level against other people and against your own level last month.

Scoring is done by the server, not the browser. If you want your result to appear in the leaderboard under your own callsign, create an account; without one the challenge still runs, it simply does not count.

Keep going

First CW QSO
Pileup
Daily Challenge
Band conditions