Ah ah! So THAT (Farnsworth) is the source of the horrible CW I hear (fast characters with excess spacing!)
Sorry but I will disagree with that approach. It teaches plain bad CW. (Okay, when I went to school they didn’t have to teach the alphabet with silly bellies and stuff either. We learned to read the English language, not pictures and so we were able to progress beyond picture books and hieroglyphics. Dumbing down elementary teaching has been a disaster and I think dumbing down CW is in the same category.) I learned CW by myself without any crutches. Sorry but I never noticed a 10wpm barrier either, it took me 4 months as a novice and 328 on the air QSOs to pass my General ticket (13wpm in front of an FCC examiner.) I think it is totally hilarious that you mention a “conspiracy by the FCC” to prevent people from getting a General class ticket back when most hams had General class tickets! Ken WA8JXM > On Dec 1, 2014, at 5:31 PM, Fred Jensen <k6...@foothill.net> wrote: > > On 12/1/2014 12:17 PM, Ken wrote: > >> Would you really suggest someone starting out at 5 wpm use a paddle >> and keyer? > > Yes. It's called Farnsworth and there is both a good body of empirical > evidence as well as explainable theory that it works better than other > methods. Learning Morse has a direct parallel with how kids learn to read. > Initially, they learn the components of the letters. For example, "D" is a > post with a big tummy, "B" is a post with two small tummies. They very > shortly learn to recognize letters as whole objects by their overall shape, > not their components. > > Farnsworth uses a character speed of about 20 WPM, however the characters are > spaced however as much as needed for a given, slower, net speed. 20 WPM is a > too fast for counting dits and dahs, and one learns to recognize letters by > their "sound shape." For me, "P" sounds like crossing a low round-topped > hill, whereas "X" sounds like crossing a narrow ravine. "R" is more like > going over a speed bump. > > When sending to the student, you want as precise Morse at a character speed > of 20 WPM as you can get, so teacher uses a keyer and paddle. When student is > sending, you want him to make the same "sound shapes" he's burning into his > brain on receiving. If he needs 1 WPM spacing to recognize the sound shape > and say or write it, that's fine, 20 WPM characters with about 10-12 second > spaces is about 1 WPM. > > There is an almost universal "plateau" at about 10-11 WPM for most people > learning Morse. In the later 50's, a conspiracy theory alleged the FCC set > the General code speed at 13 WPM on purpose because of that. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
