After I got licensed and became comfortable with simple phone (voice) operation, I noticed that the salty dogs in the local DX club were almost exclusively using CW, or Morse Code, on the radio. They practiced the art of radiotelegraphy: where the contacts were easier to make, the operators were more skilled, and the signals were stronger. I wanted in.

When I tell people I'm interested in radiotelegraphy, the most common thing I hear is "Morse Code? Why don't you just talk to people through the phone / Facebook / text?" Well, for the same reason a marathon runner doesn't hop on the bus and ride for 26.2 miles to the finish line. The attraction is the journey you undergo to reach the arbitrary goal.

I set a goal for myself at the beginning of his year: by the end of 2015, I wanted to be able to copy and send CW comfortably at 20 WPM. In my head. No pencil and paper.

I reached that goal last month. Here's how I did it.

Step 1: Learn All The Characters

Like countless CW noobs before me, I started out in with Gordon West's introductory 0-5 WPM Morse Code tapes. I insist on calling them tapes, even though they come as a set of eight CDs. That's because they're straight up dubbed from the original tapes, complete with Gordo telling you to turn the tape over for the next lesson. The audio quality is pretty dodgy, but so is that far-away DX coming over a polar path, so it's fine.

The goal of this box set is to bring you from knowing zip about Morse Code, up to the point where you can pass the exam that used to be given as part of getting the now-defunct Novice license. That exam was a five minute session of copying code sent at a character speed of 15-18 WPM, but at an effective speed of 5 WPM. This is based on a well-established principle, the Farnsworth method. With Farnsworth spacing, the individual characters are sent at a relatively fast speed, but with spaces inserted between the characters and words to give you time to recognize them. Over time, you gradually reduce the inter-character and inter-word spaces until the character speed matches the effective speed. At that point, you're copying code at standard Morse spacing.