It’s now been a few months since I originally started learning CW and about a month and a half since my ‘restart’ after passing my intermediate exam.
This time round I decided to use G4FON after discovering that I could use it on my Mac via Wine. Part of the reason for this is that although the Chuck Adams course was good I felt that the code speed was a bit slow to start with so and I was finding myself counting, also there wasn’t really any way to work on particular characters as obviously being pre-generated files you just have to follow it through.
With G4FON you follow one of two orderings of characters up to the full 40 characters, ( a-z, 0-9 and ? , / . ), but you can choose character speed and spacing speed (actual and apparent speed) as well as choosing if the spacing speed is just for between words or each character. You can also select individual characters if you have specific characters you wish to work on.
By default the set of characters you are fed is for 5 mins, but like with everything else that can be adjusted. The aim (as per the Koch method) is to start with 2 characters, hit 90% accuracy and add another character, then hit 90% accuracy with that and so on.
The settings I started with were 25wpm character speed/15wpm spacing, but I quickly realised that this was just too fast and switched to 25/12, I made reasonable progress but was still finding it frustrating and very slow process. In the end I moved down to 25/9 and recently finally hit my 90% accuracy aim for a 5 min set of characters.
I am currently studying for my full exam so I am not practicing as much as I’d like, but I am trying to keep some practice up rather than letting it drop like before my intermediate. Hopefully before long I’ll be able to spend some more time working on Morse Code and improve my speed.