This is a list of CW/Morse code learning and practice resources that I have come across and found useful. Some of these really helped me be as good at CW operating as I am today. I’ll try to categorize them and give a good description of each as I go along.
This is how I was first introduced to studying CW/Morse code. This is a pretty simple but powerful website that gets it all right. If you want to learn CW using the Koch Method, this is a great place to get it. You can start with just a few letters, then add more as you build confidence.
There are also plenty of useful tools on this website for generating callsigns, words, and sentences for you to practice copying down.
Nothing on this website for sending unfortunately, but an excellent resource for copy practice for both beginners and experts alike.
This is a website I frequent quite often for practice. The concept is very simple and very powerful. As the name suggests, this is a virtual CW “band” that allows you to talk to other users in public and private rooms, without having to get on the actual airwaves. This is an invaluable resource if you want to get actual conversational practice, but you aren’t yet confident enough to get on the air or aren’t even licensed yet!
There isn’t any special hardware required to use the website; you can use your keyboard as either a straight or iambic key. However, to truly get the full experience, I highly suggest picking up their VBand Adapter for $25. This will allow you to connect any straight, iambic, or cootie/swiper key to their website and practice what it will feel like to send with a real key.
But wait, there’s more! The way this adapter works is very simple, it converts the left/right paddle presses of your key to presses of left/right ctrl on an emulated keyboard. This means that other websites and applications can (and do!) use this very same adapter, making it even more worth having, in my opinion.
This website is one of my favorites for practicing sending. You can select from multiple sets of training exercises. The website will display a word or phrase and you send it back using your key. It’s great at giving instant feedback, making a sound on incorrect and correct characters.
You can also use this to practice your copying a bit. If you click on the word, it will play the morse version of it, then you can listen and copy it down.
When you get tired of the built-in content, you can create custom drills to challenge yourself and others.
This website has some good resources for learning to copy morse code. I particularly like the Adaptive Instant Character Recognition training tool. This one plays a character for you and gets you to say it out loud, before telling you what the character is so you can confirm you got it right. A good one for people who learn better with verbal skills involved.
This site is quite similar to the VBand site. It even supports the VBand adapter. There are multiple rooms that you can chat with others in, including a few rooms that will send things back automatically. As a departure from the VBand website, there is no decoder on Vail, so you will have to be able to copy everything yourself.
I will say, this site has possibly the most accurate and flexible keyer of all the practiced sites I have tested. There are many different options for keying modes, including one that imitates a bug, which is quite fun to try out. There is also a paddle timing debug display that will show you what paddles you pressed and what elements were generated. Very cool!
Wordle, but with morse code. Come back every day for a daily challenge word, or practice with a bank of words or callsigns. A good way to make learning fun.
(Kinda)
A really great resource for practicing copying with distractions such as pile-ups, noise, and fading. If you find you struggle in these situations or want to work up to doing POTA/SOTA activations, this tool will be very useful to you. I wish this tool had an option to key back with an adapter (and in fact, it does have a dev source branch for this), but for now, you can type your response to calls you hear and if they match callsigns that are calling you, they will respond back. It actually feels surprisingly realistic in how stations call and respond. This is definitely one of my favorite tools.
A good website for pushing your speed to new limits. The goal of this site is to key a phrase as fast as possible. I believe it started with the classic phrase “Bens best bent wire”, thus the name of the site, and expanded from there. The site will time how fast it takes you to send the phrase and you can work to beat your personal best or try to get on the global leaderboard. Something to note, however, is that timing between characters is not taken into account, so some of the leaderboards aren’t really the most accurate measures of proper code. (See the word “mississippi” for a good example of this). So use this tool wisely and take the leaderboards with a grain of salt.
I’ve been using this one quite a bit to practice my copying. I like this site a lot because I find it’s great for practicing conversational morse code skills. Sure, you can drill copying short QSOs like callsigns and other formats that are used often, but if you want to be able to ragchew and carry a conversation for more than a sentence, you’ll need a whole other set of skills. Sometimes, you don’t need to get the message down character for character, you just need to get the meaning of the message.
This site has a collection of stories that you can listen to in morse code. You’ll need to copy down what is being said, then you’ll answer a quiz at the end of the story. This is great, because you’re not getting graded on the exact copying of each character. Rather, if you can copy enough of the message to get the meaning, you should be able to answer the questions at the end.