BI4OAE

Learning CW: The Koch Method, Farnsworth Spacing and a Three-Month Plan

2026-10-18 · Operating Skills

Is CW still worth it?

Morse code is the oldest digital mode in amateur radio, and it hasn’t been overtaken. The reasons are concrete:

Morse is a sound, not a picture

The most common — and most damaging — mistake is learning from a printed table of dots and dashes. Throw the table away as a learning tool.

If you memorise A as “dot dash,” you’ve built a visual decoder in your head, and it caps your speed. Experienced operators run 20–30 WPM; at that speed there is physically no time to mentally tick off dots and dashes between characters. The ear has to hear “di-dah” as a single shape that simply means A, the way you recognise a word without spelling it.

That’s the whole game: sound in, letter out, no intermediate step.

The Koch method: full speed from day one

The Koch method, published in 1936 by German psychologist Ludwig Koch, is the most validated way to build that reflex. Koch had been asked to find out why military Morse training was failing so badly; his experiments showed the problem was the slow start.

The protocol:

  1. Begin with just two characters, sent at your target speed from the first minute — typically 15–20 WPM or faster
  2. Drill until you copy them at 90% accuracy or better
  3. Add exactly one new character, again at full speed
  4. Repeat until the full character set is instant

The 90% gate is the only test; time on task doesn’t matter, accuracy does.

Why it works: from the very first session, characters enter your memory as complete sound patterns. You never build the dot-counting habit that dooms the traditional approach — teaching the alphabet at 5 WPM and slowly speeding up leaves many learners stuck on a plateau around 8–10 WPM, sometimes for months, until they quit.

Farnsworth spacing: Koch’s practical companion

Pure Koch has one rough edge: at full speed, even the gaps between letters fly by. Donald R. “Russ” Farnsworth (W6TTB) proposed the fix in the late 1950s: keep the characters at full speed, but stretch the spaces between letters and words.

So a letter sounds like a 20 WPM letter, but you get a long pause before the next one — the effective text speed might be 8 or 10 WPM while every character keeps its correct shape. As you improve, the gaps shrink. The character sounds never change, so nothing has to be relearned. Almost every modern trainer implements Koch character speed plus Farnsworth gaps.

Tools that work

A three-month schedule

This plan assumes 15–60 minutes a day. Frequency beats duration: fifteen focused minutes daily beats a three-hour session once a week, every time.

Weeks 1–4 — build the character set. Koch drills on LCWO or similar, 15 minutes a day. Start with two characters; add one each time you clear 90%. By the end of the month you should recognise most common letters and numbers at full character speed.

Weeks 5–8 — from characters to words. Add digits and the common abbreviations (73, QTH, QRZ), then start call-sign copying. Begin passive listening on the CW segments — around 7.000–7.040 MHz on 40 m or 14.000–14.070 MHz on 20 m — receive only, no transmitting.

Weeks 9–12 — get on the air. Practise standard QSO exchanges, do a few virtual QSOs on an online trainer, then make your first real contact.

One tip that helps more than anything: look for stations advertising QRS — “send slower.” The CW community is famously tolerant of learners, and a QRS request is usually honoured with a smile.

Speed benchmarks

Don’t wait until you feel fast. Plenty of people make their first QSO at 8–10 WPM, and the air is where the training becomes real.

Mistakes that stall progress

One note on keys

Don’t spend months on a straight key. Outside nostalgic events, modern operators overwhelmingly use an iambic paddle with an electronic keyer; decades of professional straight-key sending left more than a few operators with repetitive-strain injuries. A paddle is cheap, easier on the wrist, and what you’ll actually use on the air.

References

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