Android apps for learning Morse Code

Here’s a guest post from another friend of min – Rick, KA8BMA. Thanks, Rick!

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In my seemingly endless search for the perfect Morse Code app for my tablet and cell phone, I have downloaded and tried most of the Morse Code apps from Google’s Play Store. And for different reasons, I have settled on and use two of them—Morse Trainer from Wolphi and Koch Morse Trainer Pro from Bit Ninja.

Both offer variable character speed, word speed, word spacing (Farnsworth), practice duration, and side tone frequency. In addition, both apps offer user variable character sets, Koch character maps and provide variable length sequences of random characters with selectable emphasis on recent additions to the character sets.

Koch Morse Trainer Pro, in addition offers variable volume background noise and test duration in seconds. One Koch Morse Trainer Pro feature I find really useful is the ability to tap into RSS feeds and generate Morse Code from any of the 7 selectable RSS data feeds.

Wolphi Morse Trainer offers waveform shaping to eliminate key clicks and test duration in number of character groups instead of seconds.

The most valuable feature I have found so far is Morse Trainer’s ability to read and play user generated text files. If text is comma separated, the words are played randomly. I have generated and downloaded many practice files, have generated  files from the May 2017 QST WordsWorth article (pg 74), and a list of 100 most common CW words ( W0XI’s 100 Most Common Words, Q-sigs, Pro-signs and Abbreviations ). I also have a list of two hundred plus variable length US call signs.

I would be happy to send any or all of my lists to anyone who emails me.([email protected])

Has it helped?

I started several months ago at about 10  wpm. I am currently at 23 wpm Koch and 18 wpm Farnsworth. Ihad started learning word recognition when the above QST article came out.  I started with the WordsWorth word list at 28 wpm with 5x inter word spacing. I am  currently at 30 wpm and 2x inter word spacing. I also wrote a Python script to parse combinations of my word lists and generate a list of unique words.

If I would practice regularily, stop fooling around, and, as Dan says, “GET ON THE AIR,”  I would probably be at my original goal of 25 wpm. But that wouldn’t any fun!

Rick Barnich  KA8BMA