My friend, Rick, K8BMA, sent me an email this morning that included Nancy, WZ8C’s, article on instant character recognition. This article is often cited as gospel when it comes to learning Morse Code. While I agree with her thesis that instant character recognition (ICR), I’m not sure that her advice to “overlearn” Morse Code is any better than my mantra, which is “practice, practice, practice.”
I replied to Rick, “While I agree that instant character recognition is the key, the question is how to learn how to do that? I’m not sure that WZ8C’s approach will really do the trick. You’ve done a lot of code-practice type programs, perhaps you could write a program inspired by her comments. If you really wanted to get fancy, you could even incorporate speech recognition so that that program recognizes what the student is saying. And, once the student achieves ICR for the entire alphabet, you can move on to words.”
Of course, that got me thinking that this has probably already been done before, so I did an internet search and came up with the following:
- Morse Code World: Instant Character Recognition. This online tool seems to be very comprehensive. It allows you to choose character sets from several different code courses (CWops, LICW, LCWO, and Koch) and different feedback methods. It also lets you set the recognition time (WZ8C suggests 500 ms).
- WA7PGE: Instant Character Recognition. This is a command-line driven tool. If you’re not familiar with using the command line to run programs, you might want to skip this one.
- Morse Code Ninja Modern Code Course. Kurt, ADoWE’s code course contains both instant character recognition and instant word recognition.
If you use any of these programs, let me know how you like it. Either comment below or email me directly.