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CW Training

CW Training is built for your ears, not your eyes. It sends one random Morse character, gives you a Farnsworth recognition pause, speaks the answer, and either repeats that complete pair or begins the next prompt. The loop continues until you press Stop.

During playback, the current character, answer, dots, and dashes never appear on screen. The character picker is visible only while configuring the session. No microphone permission is needed.

Start a Session​

  1. Open CW Training in the Tools section of the sidebar.
  2. Set Character speed for the speed inside each character.
  3. Set Spacing speed for the longer recognition pause.
  4. Set the CW tone pitch and volume.
  5. Choose an answer voice.
  6. Choose letters, digits, punctuation, or any combination. Expand Choose individual characters to fine-tune those selected sets.
  7. Choose how many extra times to Repeat each character.
  8. Press Play, listen, and name each character in your head before the spoken answer.

The default is 20 WPM character speed with 10 WPM effective spacing. Character-speed choices are 12, 15, 18, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 WPM. Spacing choices are 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 WPM, capped at the selected character speed.

The CW pitch is adjustable from 400 to 900 Hz and defaults to 650 Hz. CW volume is adjustable from 20% to 100% and defaults to 60%. Stop playback before changing the controls; each session keeps the character, repeat, speed, tone, and voice settings it started with.

Practice Sets​

  • Letters: 26
  • Digits: 10
  • Punctuation: 18 (. , ? ' ! / ( ) & : ; = + - _ " $ @)

The three circular controls are independent multi-select choices, so you can practice any combination. Expand Choose individual characters to include or remove specific characters inside every selected set. A partly selected parent shows a mixed state, and Hamtrax always keeps at least one character enabled.

The shuffle bag draws every enabled character once before reshuffling, and it prevents the last character of one cycle from immediately returning at the start of the next.

Repeat Each Character​

Choose 0 times, 1 time, 2 times, or 3 times. The number is how many extra times Hamtrax repeats the complete Morse sound and spoken answer before moving to another character. For example, 2 times produces three complete sound-and-answer pairs for the same character.

Answer Voices and Playback​

CW Training includes three self-hosted answer voices:

  • Allison · US — human-recorded American English and the default
  • Jay · UK — human-recorded British English
  • Original · US — the original synthesized Piper voice

The human voices use professionally recorded Asterisk prompt sets, trimmed and combined into compact Hamtrax audio sprites. The web app downloads and caches only the voice you select, so changing voices can require a connection the first time. The installed native app bundles all three packs.

Minimizing the panel or clicking behind it does not interrupt practice. Open CW Training from the sidebar to restore the same session. Stop ends the session; closing the panel or signing out also stops playback and releases its audio resources.

CW Training or CW Decoder?​

Use CW Training to build direct sound recognition without a visual answer. Use the CW Decoder when you want microphone audio translated into visible text and signal-processing views.