Everything in the app,
and how to use it

The highest-value thing you can learn. Nothing else comes close.

You need to recognize your call instantly when someone sends it, which is your cue that the contact is yours and it's your turn, and you need to send it cleanly and consistently. Both directions matter, and most people drill only the first.

How to drill it in the app:

• Set it once in Settings › QSO & Pileups › Your callsign, so the app uses it throughout.
• Turn on Use my word list and put your callsign in it (with a few near-misses: calls that share your prefix or suffix). Then run Common Words: you're training to pick your call out of things that sound like it, which is the real skill.
• Pick CW 77 and turn on Include my callsign and name, so your call and name come round with the words you'll hear alongside them.
• Rapid Fire → Call signs for volume, so your call stops being a special case and becomes one call among many.
• Sending Practice to key it back until the rhythm is automatic and identical every time.

The single character that rescues any exchange you've lost.

?, sent as ··−−··, means "repeat" or "I didn't get that". Send it and the other operator sends again. It costs one character to learn and it turns a failed contact into a successful one, which is why it belongs this early.

It's already in the base character set, with no setting to turn on, so it will come up in normal practice. Worth deliberately over-learning anyway: you want it available under pressure, when you're flustered and half a callsign short.

Two letters that complete most of the exchanges you'll hear.

An enormous share of US CW traffic ends in a two-letter state abbreviation, and the POTA exchange is essentially a signal report plus a location. Learn yours cold, and learn to copy the common ones.

Rapid Fire → State abbreviations drills exactly this, back to back.

Rounds out the vocabulary of a short contact.

• CQ: calling anyone.
• DE: "from", separating the called station from the caller.
• RST and 5NN / 599: the signal report. Nearly always 599 in practice; note the cut numbers, since 5NN is what you'll actually hear.
• TU: thank you, and the usual sign that the contact is done.
• 73: best regards, the standard sign-off.
• QRZ: "who is calling me?"

Abbreviations and Q-Codes cover these, and the Reference chart lets you tap any of them to hear it.

The fast track above, as a guided lesson: just enough CW to hunt one POTA activator, and nothing more.

Open it from the First Four card on the home screen, just under "Start here", or from the first-run screen's Or learn just enough for your first POTA contact, which records your answer to the proficiency question exactly as Start practicing does and then opens First Four. Enter your callsign and your state (or province) the first time; they're saved as Your callsign and Your state in Settings › QSO & Pileups, and Change on the stage list edits them. The W1AW placeholder doesn't count as a callsign.

There are seven stages. Any of them can be opened at any time from the list; Begin / Continue takes you to the first one you haven't passed, and each stage's Next button follows the list.

A miss resets a copy or send count to zero. In the scenes a slip doesn't end the run: the screen says what went wrong and waits for another try, but only a run with no slips counts. Sending your call twice (K9QRO K9QRO) is accepted wherever your call is asked for, and word spacing is ignored both when you type and when you key, since it's the part of a beginner's fist the decoder is least sure of.

Everything plays at your own speed and tone from Settings. You send on the on-screen key (straight key or paddles, per Settings) or a hardware key; the answer submits itself once you've keyed enough characters and stopped, or tap Submit. The activators are fictional, a different one each run.

Pass the last stage and First Four ends with a note worth repeating here: a first CW contact is a big deal, for you and often for the activator too. Afterwards, follow up — a QSL card, an email, or just a thank-you note. Many activators love hearing they were someone's first.

First Four is a tutorial, not a scored mode: it isn't recorded as a session in Progress and isn't on the leaderboard. An answer in it does count as a practice day for your streak. Start over, at the bottom of the stage list, clears the stages and keeps your callsign and state.

The next step after First Four: the rules of the pileup, one at a time. What to send, when to send it, and when to stay quiet while you hunt POTA activators.

Open it from the Operating Procedure card on the home screen, directly under First Four (on a big iPad or tablet window, stacked with Start here and First Four beside Daily Dit). The card shows how many lessons you've passed. Every example uses your callsign and state from Settings › QSO & Pileups, and the section asks for them the first time if they aren't set (the W1AW placeholder doesn't count). A row at the top of the lesson list opens First Four, which is where to start if you can't yet hear and send your own call. First Four's last card points back here.

There are eight lessons, and each one has three parts:

• The idea: a few short paragraphs.
• Hear it: right and wrong examples, played at your speed and tone, with the transcript beside them.
• Try it: three to five quick situations. A clip plays and you pick what to do. After each pick the screen says why.

A lesson passes when you get all of its situations right in one go. A wrong pick doesn't stop the run, but you'll need to go again. Any lesson can be opened at any time, and Begin / Continue takes you to the first one you haven't passed.

Offsetting: zero beat, RIT and XIT

On CW the tone you hear is how far a signal is from where your receiver is tuned, plus your rig's CW pitch setting. Your sidetone is set to the same pitch, so a station that sounds exactly like your sidetone is on the frequency you'd transmit on: you're zero beat. That's how you get onto an activator's frequency.

In a pileup, though, everyone zero beat merges into one tone, so call a little off: 20 to 100 Hz, as the Parks on the Air CW Guide puts it. RIT moves what you hear and leaves where you transmit alone. XIT moves where you transmit and leaves what you hear alone. A forgotten RIT is the classic way to call off frequency by accident. The lesson has a table of what Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood, Elecraft and FlexRadio call each control.

• The pileup. Five hunters answer a CQ, one of them you, as the activator hears them. It plays three times: everyone zero beat; only you 80 Hz up; then everyone on their own offset. The difference between them is the lesson.
• RIT. The activator is 200 Hz above you. Slide the RIT and play: their pitch moves, and the screen shows that where you'd transmit doesn't.
• Zero-beat it. The activator is somewhere off your frequency. Tune with the −50, −10, +10 and +50 Hz buttons. Station plays them, Spot plays your sidetone, and Together plays both so you can hear the beat slow down and stop. Tap Done: anything within 20 Hz counts. Three in a row pass the drill.

The offsetting lesson passes when you've passed the drill and got its situations right in one go.

What should you do?

Ten situations, dealt at random from lessons 3 to 8. A clip plays and you choose whether to send something or stay silent. Each answer says why, names its lesson, and has a button that opens the lesson. At the end you see your score and can go again. Nothing is kept except the practice day.

Like First Four, Operating Procedure is teaching material, not a scored mode. It isn't recorded as a session in Progress and isn't on the leaderboard, but an answer counts as a practice day for your streak. Everything plays at your own speed and tone. On a big iPad or a wide window the lessons sit in two columns, and a lesson puts the idea beside the practice. Start over, at the bottom of the lesson list, clears your progress and keeps your callsign and state.

The procedure follows WB0RLJ's Advice for CW POTA Hunters, with thanks. Jim Vaughan (WB0RLJ) posts recordings of his daily activations on his YouTube channel, and both links are at the foot of the section in the app. It also follows the Parks on the Air CW Guide and Hunter Guide.

Multiple choice. The answer choices are drawn from characters you've already met, and they're deliberately sound-alikes: B against D, U against V, S against H, so the quiz mirrors the confusions that actually happen on the air. The number of buttons grows as you learn, up to the Answer choices limit in Settings › Practice & Feedback.

No choices at all. Hear it, type it. Harder and more honest than multiple choice, because there's nothing to eliminate. This is the whole point of Type It, and a hardware keyboard works too if you have one paired: just type the answer and it's submitted.

The choice quizzes (Characters, Common Words, CW 77's Quiz, Abbreviations, Q-Codes, Prosigns and Confusion Drill) can take a typed answer too, set by Answer entry in Settings › Practice & Feedback or the Answers menu in the drill itself:

• Tap (the default) keeps the buttons.
• Progressive makes the answer method part of each level: you start on 4 choices, move to 6 once you get 18 of your last 20 right, then to typing the answer after 18 of 20 more. Each quiz climbs its own ladder, and a new level (a new character, or a new Characters stage) starts again at 4 choices, since multiple choice is the scaffold for something new.
• Type always has you type, for when you want to jump straight to full recall.

A single character is submitted the moment you type it, so typing costs no more time than a tap; words take Submit or Return. Don't know passes the item as a miss. Drills whose answer is a meaning or a prosign always show the choices, and Key answers or Voice answers, when you have switched one on, take precedence over typing. A wrong typed character counts in your stats and confusion matrix exactly like a wrong tap; a blank, a slip of two characters, or a symbol Morse has no code for is a miss with nothing recorded as the character it was mistaken for.

Turn on Voice answers (the mode's setup on iOS, Settings › Practice & Feedback on Android) and say the answer instead of tapping it. It understands NATO phonetics ("Charlie"), letter names ("see"), digit words ("niner"), and punctuation by name ("slash", "question mark"). When it isn't sure it asks "did you say…?" rather than marking you wrong, and it learns your corrections, so your accent and habits improve the matching over time. Uses the microphone; nothing leaves the device.

On iPhone and iPad, listening starts by itself the moment the tone ends, and your recognition time runs from when you start speaking. The microphone stays open for the whole session, so the sound is set up once rather than around every answer. With Bluetooth earbuds such as AirPods, the Morse stays in your ears at full quality and the phone's own microphone hears your answer, so keep the phone within earshot. If it hears nothing for eight seconds it shows the answers to tap. On Android you tap Speak answer for each prompt, because Android's recognizer plays a start chime every time it opens the microphone and would chime over every character if the app listened automatically; the clock runs from the tap.

Answer by sending, not selecting. Key the character on the on-screen touch key or a connected MIDI key and the app decodes what you sent. It's available in every choice quiz whose answer is a character or a word, with a Key answers toggle in the session bar so you can flip between keying and tapping mid-drill; drills whose answer is a meaning or a prosign show the choices instead. This is the fastest way to make sending and receiving reinforce each other. See Sending Practice for the dedicated mode. If you send with paddles, switch the on-screen key to touch paddles.

The guided path. If you don't know what to practice, practice this.

Journey is a leveled route through the whole of CW, and it decides the curriculum for you. It runs through seven sections in order:

1. Letters & Numbers: two new characters per level
2. Punctuation: one per level
3. Prosigns: two per level
4. Q-Codes: two per level
5. Abbreviations: two per level
6. Words: four per level, from the 60 most common
7. Call Signs: three per level

How a level works

Each level introduces its new items and mixes them with what you already know. A progress bar fills on a hit and drains on a miss, and you clear the level by filling it, so a run of misses genuinely sets you back. (If you'd rather it didn't drain, turn off Misses drain the bar in the Journey's setup.)

You can answer with a hardware key as well as by tapping or typing: keyed answers follow the same rule as Key answers in the choice quizzes, and what you key is checked when you stop keying.

A level's new items get at least half of its prompts, so a prosign level actually drills the prosigns rather than quizzing you on letters you learned weeks ago, and a prosign's wrong answers are other prosigns once the pool has them, not three plain letters you could rule out from the labels.

The unlock map shows the whole route: what you've cleared, where you are, and what's ahead. Progress is saved, so you can put it down for a week and pick up where you left off. What you told the app at first run (and can change under Settings › Characters & Lessons › Proficiency) unlocks the Journey that far too: someone who knows the letters starts at the first level with a digit in it, and "everything" starts at the first prosign level. It only ever unlocks forward, so cleared levels are never taken back.

The classic Koch ladder, with you holding the controls instead of Journey.

A-Z and 0-9, added one at a time as your recognition time comes down. Same engine as Journey, but you choose the settings and there's no level structure, just the ladder.

Meeting a new character

Before a character or prosign is drilled for the first time, the track stops and introduces it: the item on its own, its pattern in symbols and spoken out as "dah-di-dah", its sound when the screen appears and again on Replay, and a Start button when you're ready. Then the drill carries on with it in the mix. If you'd rather meet new characters cold, Settings › Characters & Lessons › Introduce new characters turns the introduction off.

Track stage

The Characters track moves through stages as you improve: single characters → pairs → triples → words & call signs. Normally it advances on its own, but you can pin it if you want to stay on single characters for a while longer, or jump ahead to word-length copy.

The pin is on the setup screen and, since the stage is the thing you most often want to change once words start coming at you, it's one gear-tap away mid-session too: on iOS the Track stage picker sits in the session's Settings with a "Back to" button for the previous stage, and on Android the stage pills sit on the drill itself, in Characters and in Sending Practice.

Pinning is the right call when you want deliberate practice on one thing. Leave it unpinned when you just want the app to keep you at the edge of your ability.

Reach for this the moment two characters start blurring together.

The app keeps a confusion matrix. Every time you answer D when it sent B, tapped, typed or keyed, it's recorded. Confusion Drill reads that matrix and builds a session out of your actual mix-ups, not a generic list of tricky pairs.

If you haven't recorded enough confusions yet, it falls back to your slowest active characters paired against their nearest sound-alikes, which is a good drill in its own right.

When to use it: when accuracy is fine but one or two pairs keep costing you. Ten minutes here is worth an hour of general practice for a pair you've been fumbling for weeks.

Arcade recognition: the Characters drill with a clock on it, and a game you can lose.

Aliens descend the play field in five columns, and you shoot each one by naming the character it carries before it reaches the ground. Two ways to play:

• Hear it, type it: the aliens come down unmarked. Each one is sent in Morse as it appears (tap it to hear it again); type the character you heard on the on-screen keyboard, and the lowest alien carrying it is hit. The keyboard is laid out QWERTY, with a digit row above it whenever the set has digits and any punctuation on a row below; keys outside your current set stay in place, dimmed and dead, so the layout never shifts as the set grows and the reflex you build is the one a real keyboard rewards. A hardware keyboard works too.
• See it, key it: each alien shows its character directly above it. Key it on the on-screen key or a hardware key, and the decoded character shoots the lowest one carrying it.

The aliens carry either your active Koch set, so the game drills exactly what you're learning, or the full alphabet and digits.

The speed ramp

In hear-it mode the game starts slow and speeds up only as you consolidate. A game opens 10 WPM below your character speed, never below 15, and steps up 1 WPM after six hits in a row at the current speed, until it reaches your character speed. A wrong shot resets that streak and leaves the speed alone; an alien that lands resets it and steps the speed back 2 WPM, never below where the game started. After any change of speed, up or down, the first three hits are settling hits that don't count, so a fumble while you adjust costs nothing. The upshot: at around 90% accuracy the speed climbs steadily, at 80% it crawls, and below that it all but stops; a speed that beat you takes eighteen clean hits to reach again. Farnsworth spacing doesn't apply, since a single character has no gaps to stretch. The setup card says where a game will open and where it climbs to, the score line shows the speed right now, and the end card shows the highest speed you reached. At a character speed of 15 there is nothing to ramp and every alien is sent at 15. In see-it mode nothing is sent, so there is no ramp: the decoder listens at your character speed.

Characters you miss come back

Within a game, a character you miss, whether an alien that lands or a wrong shot while it was the lowest alien on the field, is dealt more often until you've mastered it again: one miss makes it twice as likely to be the next alien, each hit on it brings that back down, and after two more hits than misses it's back to normal. The weighting is capped (a character is never more than four times as likely as the others), the game still prefers characters not already on the field, and it resets with every new game, so nothing you missed last week follows you. This works the same in both modes.

How it's scored

The end card shows your score, the wave you reached, accuracy, best combo and, in hear-it mode, the speed you reached. Your input, character set and difficulty are remembered for next time.

It counts. Every hit and miss feeds the same per-character stats and confusion matrix as the drills do: a wrong shot records the pair you confused, and an invader that lands is a miss on that character. A game is real practice, not a break from it.

The second arcade game: the same drill as Morse Invaders, but the enemies come at you instead of falling.

Enemies swoop onto the field one at a time along curved paths, alternating from the left and the right, and settle into a formation at the top. Once a few have settled, one at a time peels off and dives at your ship at the bottom; if it isn't shot it loops back to its slot and will dive again. You shoot an enemy by naming the character it carries. Two ways to play, the same two as Invaders:

• Hear it, type it: the enemies fly in unmarked. Each one is sent in Morse as it enters, and sent again as it starts a dive, so the threat announces itself (tap any enemy to hear it again). Type the character you heard on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard, the same one Invaders uses, and the most dangerous enemy carrying it is hit. A hardware keyboard works too.
• See it, key it: each enemy shows its character directly above it. Key it on the on-screen key or a hardware key, and the decoded character shoots the most dangerous one carrying it.

"Most dangerous" is decided for you: a diving enemy first (the lower it is, the sooner), then one climbing back from a dive, then the lowest row of the formation, then anything still flying in. The enemies carry either your active Koch set or the full alphabet and digits, and a character already on the field is not sent again while another is free, so a character usually names exactly one enemy.

The speed ramp

In hear-it mode the game starts slow and speeds up as you land hits, on a gentler ramp than Invaders'. A game opens 8 WPM below your character speed, never below 15, and steps up 1 WPM after every six hits (six in total, not in a row) until it reaches your character speed. A dive that gets through steps the speed back 1 WPM, never below where the game started; a wrong shot leaves it alone. Farnsworth spacing doesn't apply, since a single character has no gaps to stretch. The setup card says where a game will open and where it climbs to, the score line shows the speed right now, and the end card shows the highest speed you reached. In see-it mode nothing is sent, so there is no ramp: the decoder listens at your character speed.

How it's scored

The end card shows your score, the wave you reached, accuracy, best combo and, in hear-it mode, the speed you reached. Your input, character set and difficulty are remembered for next time, separately from Invaders'.

It counts. Every hit and miss feeds the same per-character stats and confusion matrix as the drills and Invaders do: a wrong shot records the pair you confused (what you pressed against the most dangerous enemy on the field), and a dive that gets through is a miss on that character. The session lands in your history as CW Galaga.

Arcade callsign copy: hear a callsign under pressure, find it on the screen, act on it before it's too late.

Cities and ships — the assets — line the bottom of the play field, each with its callsign written under it. Attackers come down from the top in five columns, and each one sends the callsign of the asset it is heading for in Morse as it launches (tap it to hear it again). Nothing on screen says where an attacker is going; only the callsign does. Copy it, find that asset, and route the defense to it before the attacker arrives. Two ways to route:

• Tap the target: tap the asset whose callsign you heard. The attacker aimed at it is destroyed. Tap an asset nothing is aimed at and the shot is wasted.
• Type the callsign: type what you heard on the on-screen keyboard — the same QWERTY layout as Morse Invaders, with a digit row when the callsigns can have digits and a backspace — and the defense routes itself the moment your copy matches an asset. A copy that runs past the longest callsign on the field without matching is a wasted shot. A hardware keyboard works too, and so does a hardware key: each character it decodes counts as a key press.

An attacker that reaches its asset destroys it; the rubble stays where it stood so the row doesn't shift under you, and any other attacker aimed at the same asset turns back. The assets are your lives: when the last one falls, the game is over.

Where the callsigns come from

From my characters (the default) spells four-character, call-like groups only from your active Koch set — a digit in the second position when your set has one (K5MR), letters throughout when it doesn't (KMRS) — so nothing is ever sent that you haven't met. Real callsigns uses genuine US-style calls in the everyday shapes (K1AB, AB1C, K1ABC, AB1CD). No two assets on the field ever share a callsign.

The speed ramp

A game opens 8 WPM below your character speed, never below 15, and steps up 2 WPM after every four hits (four in total, not in a row) until it reaches your character speed. Losing an asset steps the speed back 2 WPM, never below where the game started; a wasted shot leaves it alone. Because a callsign is several characters, Farnsworth spacing applies when it's switched on: the characters go at the ramp's speed and the gaps between them stretch to your effective speed. The setup card says where a game will open and where it climbs to, the score line shows the speed right now, and the end card shows the highest speed you reached.

How it's scored

The end card shows your score, the wave you reached, accuracy, best combo and the speed you reached. Your input, callsign source and difficulty are remembered for next time.

It counts. Every route feeds the same per-character stats and confusion matrix as the drills do, character by character: a correct route is a hit on each character of the callsign; a wrong tap or a wrong typed copy is compared position by position against the callsign of the attacker nearest arrival, so routing K1AB when K1AR was sent records B confused with R; an attacker that gets through is a miss on each character it sent. The session record counts one attempt per callsign, and its chart shows the characters.

Copy on the way in, send on the way out: a roguelike where every spell is a word you hear and every counter is a word you key.

You stand in a dungeon room facing one or two monsters. Each one casts a spell by sending a word in Morse (FIRE, STORM, CURSE). Copy it, look it up in the spell book on screen, and key the counter word (WATER, PORT, BLESS) on the on-screen key or a hardware key before the attack lands. The word you key is decoded live; it casts the moment it matches the counter, or, if it doesn't, as soon as a word gap of silence follows it. Tap a monster to hear its spell again; the clock keeps running.

• A counter keyed in time takes one hit off the monster and scores. A counter marked ♥ in the spell book also heals you one life, up to the three you started with.
• A wrong word, or the window closing with nothing keyed, costs a life. Keying the spell itself back instead of its counter is a wrong word; the game tells you so.
• When every monster in the room is down the room is cleared and the next opens. Rooms 1 and 2 hold one monster, later rooms two, and every fifth room is a dragon that takes four hits instead of two.

The spell book

Twenty-four fixed pairs, each spelled from the letters you'd know at some point on the Koch ladder, from TRAP → MAP (eight letters in) to HEX → CHARM (the whole alphabet). With My active characters the book holds only the pairs your current set spells, so a learner partway up the ladder gets a short book of words made from letters they know. If the set spells fewer than three pairs, the four starter spells (which need the first ten Koch letters) are used instead, and the setup screen says so. Full alphabet plays the whole book. The pairs in play are shown on the setup screen and along the bottom of the room during a run.

The speed ramp

Spells are sent at a speed that climbs as you land counters. A game opens 8 WPM below your character speed, never below 15, and steps up 1 WPM after every four counters (four in total, not in a row) until it reaches your character speed. A hit taken steps it back 1 WPM, never below where the game started. Unlike Morse Invaders, a spell is a whole word, so your Farnsworth spacing applies to it when the switch is on: the letters speed up with the ramp, the gaps between them stay at your effective speed. The setup screen says where a game opens and where it climbs to; the score line shows the speed right now; the end card shows the highest speed you reached.

How it's scored

The end card shows your score, rooms cleared, accuracy, best combo and the speed you reached. Your character set and difficulty are remembered for next time.

It counts. Every character of every counter you key feeds the same per-character stats and confusion matrix as the drills do, letter by letter against the counter word: a right letter is a hit, a wrong letter records the pair you confused, and a letter you never reached (short or late) is a miss on that letter. A run is real sending practice, not a break from it.

Arcade crossing: hear a character, find it in the traffic, and hop.

A frog starts on the near bank and has to reach the far one: three lanes of road, a median to catch your breath, then three lanes of river. You move it the classic way, one hop at a time on the four direction buttons under the board (a hardware keyboard's arrow keys work too). Morse decides what is safe.

Every vehicle and every log carries a character from your set. Each lane has a cue: as soon as you land on the row below it the game sends one of that lane's characters in Morse, and the lane is outlined so you know which one the cue is for. Tap the board to hear it again.

• On the road, the vehicle carrying the cue is harmless: you can stand in its path and it passes straight through you, and that counts as a correct decision. Every other vehicle is a hit and costs a life. Empty asphalt is safe, so you can wait for a gap; the cued vehicle is the one you never have to dodge.
• On the river, you have to land on a log, and only the log carrying the cue floats. It carries you sideways with it (and round the far edge, if it gets there). Any other log sinks, and water is water: both cost a life.

A life lost puts the frog back on the near bank with fresh cues. Reaching the far bank completes a wave: the traffic is laid out again a little faster and you start over from the bank, keeping your combo.

The label ladder

How much the labels help changes with the wave, so the same board turns from a reading exercise into a copying one:

The traffic carries either your active Koch set, so the game drills exactly what you're learning, or the full alphabet and digits.

The speed ramp

The cues start slow and speed up as you get lanes right. A game opens 8 WPM below your character speed, never below 15, and steps up 2 WPM after every four correct lane decisions (four in total, not in a row) until it reaches your character speed. Losing a life steps it back 2 WPM, never below where the game started. Farnsworth spacing doesn't apply to a single character. The setup card says where a game will open and where it climbs to, the score line shows the speed right now, and the end card shows the highest speed you reached.

How it's scored

The end card shows your score, the wave you reached, accuracy, best combo and the speed you reached. Your character set and difficulty are remembered for next time.

It counts. Every lane decision feeds the same per-character stats and confusion matrix as the drills do, exactly as Morse Invaders does: a correct decision is a recognition of the cue, timed from the end of its tone; a wrong vehicle or log records the pair you confused (the cue you heard, the character you chose); the water is a miss on the cue with no partner.

Arcade sending: the other half of Morse Invaders. There you name what you hear; here you key what you see.

Your ship sits at the center of the field and asteroids drift in from the edges, each carrying a visible label. Destroy one before it reaches the ship. Two ways to play:

• See it, send it: key an asteroid's label on the on-screen key or a hardware key. Each decoded character is added to what you've sent so far (the readout under the field shows it): the moment it spells a label, the nearest asteroid carrying that label is destroyed; while it could still be the start of a label, the game waits for the next character; when it can't be, that's a miss and the readout clears. A pause of 2.5 s with a partial label pending clears it silently. You choose which asteroid to send next, so with several on screen, take the one nearest the ship.
• Hear it, tap it: the game sends one asteroid's label in Morse, and only the asteroid carrying it is the target. Tap it; tap the ship (or Hear it again) to hear the label once more. Tapping an asteroid with a different label is a miss; tapping empty space does nothing. When the target is gone, the next one is sent at once.

Asteroids carry either your active Koch set or the full alphabet and digits. The first two waves are single characters. From wave 3 some spawns are larger asteroids carrying a short word (two to five characters from the top 300 common words, spelled entirely from your set) or a generated callsign; the share grows 15% a wave up to half of spawns. A word asteroid splits when hit: one small asteroid per character, fanning out from where it was, each still heading for the ship. In hear-it mode the whole word is sent as one unit.

The speed ramp

In hear-it mode the game starts slow and speeds up as you land hits, more gently than Morse Invaders does. A game opens 8 WPM below your character speed, never below 15, and steps up 1 WPM after every four hits (four in total, not in a row) until it reaches your character speed. An asteroid that reaches the ship steps the speed back 1 WPM, never below where the game started; a miss leaves it alone. Farnsworth spacing doesn't apply. The setup card says where a game will open and where it climbs to, the score line shows the speed right now, and the end card shows the highest speed you reached. In see-it mode nothing is sent, so there is no ramp: the decoder listens at your character speed.

How it's scored

The end card shows your score, the wave you reached, accuracy, best combo and, in hear-it mode, the speed you reached. Your input, character set and difficulty are remembered for next time.

It counts. Every hit and miss feeds the same per-character stats and confusion matrix as the drills do. A destroyed asteroid is a correct recognition of every character in its label; a wrong character keyed, or the wrong asteroid tapped, records the pair you confused (the character that was expected against the one you sent or picked); an asteroid that reaches the ship is a miss on each of its characters. The end card's accuracy counts asteroids; the session in Progress counts characters, so a word is worth its length there.

The jump from copying letters to copying language.

Whole ham-radio words sent as single units: CQ, DE, ANTENNA, RIG. The goal is to stop spelling words out letter by letter and start recognizing their overall shape, the same way you read English without sounding out syllables.

Your own word list

Turn on Use my word list (the Common Words setup on iOS, Settings › Practice & Feedback on Android) and paste in whatever you want: your callsign, your local repeater, club names, the vocabulary of whatever you actually talk about on the air. One entry per line, or separated by commas or spaces; the list needs at least two words before the switch will take. The quiz then draws from your list instead of the built-in ranked pool.

The built-in pool is the 1000 most useful words, ranked, and it's size-adjustable: top 100, 300, 500 or 1000. A smaller pool means more repetition per word, a larger one means more variety.

CW 77

The pool can be the CW 77 (CWOps) list instead: on iOS it's an entry in the word-pool picker, on Android the Use CW 77 (CWOps) instead switch under the word pool. You hear the item and pick it, prosigns included (a prosign is picked from the choices even with keyed answers on). The same Use 40 WPM, no Farnsworth preset and Include my callsign and name switch appear with it. Your own word list, when it's on, still takes precedence. The list also has a tile of its own, CW 77, which runs this same quiz as its Quiz style.

The seventy things you'll hear in every contact, until they arrive as words.

The CWOps CW 77 list as a mode of its own, on the tile next to Common Words. Its setup screen asks for a Style:

• Listen: Listen & Learn over the CW 77 list. Each item plays, then it's shown and read back, per the Readback choice: spelled out and then its meaning, or the meaning alone. The Gap before the spoken answer is Listen & Learn's too. It's hands-free and keeps playing with the screen locked, with the lock-screen and car controls.
• Quiz: the Common Words quiz over the CW 77 list. Hear the item and answer it by tapping a choice, by typing it (Answer entry in Settings › Practice & Feedback, or the Answers menu in the drill), or by keying it with keyed answers on; a prosign is always picked from the choices. It's scored like Common Words.

The app remembers the style you chose last and opens on it. Up front on the same screen are the list's options: the one-tap Use 40 WPM, no Farnsworth; Callsign and Name fields for your own station (the same Your callsign and Your name as Settings › QSO & Pileups, so typing here changes them there); and Include my callsign and name, which appears once either is set. They're the same settings as the CW 77 choices in Listen & Learn and Common Words, which are still there, so changing one changes both.

Sessions go into Progress under their own names: CW 77 for the Quiz, with its accuracy, and CW 77 Listen for the Listen style, which counts items heard and shows no accuracy, as Listen & Learn does. Both count as a day's practice for your streak and your buddy streak. CW 77 isn't one of the ranked modes, so nothing is posted to the shared leaderboard. Both apps have both styles.

Copying it isn't enough. You have to know what it means.

The everyday shorthand of CW: TNX, HW, OM, FB, 73. The question here isn't "what did you hear?". It's "what are they saying?". You pick the meaning, not the letters.

That distinction matters. On the air you don't have time to copy HW?, then translate it. It has to arrive already meaning "how do you copy me?".

The three-letter codes that carry most of an operating conversation.

QRZ, QSY, QTH, QSB, QRM. You answer with the meaning, same as Abbreviations.

The punctuation of a QSO: run-together patterns that aren't letters at all.

<AR> (end of message), <SK> (end of contact), <BT> (break), <KN> (go ahead, specific station). Each is sent as one continuous character with no gap, which is exactly what makes them hard: <AR> is not "A then R", it's its own sound.

Learn these before your first real QSO. They're how you tell someone you're finished talking, and copying them wrong makes for an awkward contact.

Continuous copy. No prompts, no choices, just text flowing past at speed.

This is the closest thing to real on-air copy. Text is sent continuously and you follow along. Three sources:

• Fables: 32 bundled public-domain short stories. Each is a few minutes of copy, self-contained.
• Longer classics: Sherlock Holmes and friends, sent in parts, with a bookmark that keeps your place between sessions. Genuinely enjoyable once you can copy at pace, because you want to know what happens next.
• Today's news: real RSS headlines, sanitized into sendable Morse and hidden until you reveal them. Decoding is the only way to read them, which is a strong motivator and a nice daily ritual.

Copying without writing anything down, the skill that makes conversation possible.

A whole word is sent. You hold it in your head, then self-grade whether you got it before the answer is shown. No typing, no tapping. The point is to build the mental buffer that lets you hold a callsign or a name while the other station keeps sending.

Auto-repeats

After the prompt plays, Head Copy can replay it a few times so you can re-hear it without mentally replaying it yourself, then counts down to the reveal with a live "Revealing in 3…". Both are in Settings › Practice & Feedback: Auto-repeats from 0 to 3 (default 2) and Auto-reveal after 0 to 10 seconds (default 5; at 0 it waits for you). The manual Repeat button is always there too.

Be honest with the self-grading. It's the only mode where you're the judge, and marking a near-miss as correct only fools yourself.

Free recall. No multiple choice to lean on.

Hear it, type it. Multiple choice lets you work backwards by elimination. Type It removes that entirely, so it's a much truer test of whether a character is actually learned. Expect your accuracy to drop when you first switch over; that drop is the honest number.

A paired hardware keyboard works here (and in the choice quizzes and Journey): just type and the answer submits. So does a hardware key: what you key is decoded into the answer box and checked when you stop keying.

High-speed copy for when 33 WPM has stopped feeling fast.

Free-recall typing at 35, 40, 50 or 60 WPM. At these speeds there is no time for anything but instant recognition, which is precisely the point. It's the mode that proves whether a character is truly automatic or merely fast.

QRQ runs on its own speed setting and does not touch your global WPM, so you can push here without disturbing the speed the rest of your practice uses. 50 and 60 are there for operators who already work QRQ; if 35 is a struggle, that is the right place to stay.

Type your answer, or key it on a hardware key: it's decoded into the answer box and checked when you stop keying.

Don't start here. Come back to it once your recognition times at 33 WPM are consistently under a second.

One five-letter word a day, sent in Morse, the same for every player on the same date. The ten-minute habit, with a scoreboard.

Tap the card on the home screen, pick a starting speed, and play the word. Type a five-letter guess and every letter is scored: green is the right letter in the right place, amber is a letter that's in the word but somewhere else, and gray is not in the word at all. Letters you've ruled out are listed underneath so you don't burn a guess on them twice. You can key a guess on a hardware key instead of typing it: five keyed letters make a guess, and one that isn't accepted is cleared with the reason left on screen.

There is no limit on guesses or listens. Both are counted, and both bring the code down to you. Each guess has to be a real word, checked against a full dictionary, so CRANE and SLATE are fine even though the answers themselves come from a shorter list of common words.

The speed ladder

This is what makes it a CW game rather than a word game. The word plays at the speed you chose, and the code slows by 5 WPM for every three listens and, separately, 5 WPM for every three wrong guesses, down to a floor of 10. A listen is every play of the word, the first and every replay, so hearing it again is never free, but it is cheap. The two counts step the speed independently and the steps add: four listens and three wrong guesses from 60 WPM puts you at 50. A word you can't catch at 75 comes back within reach, and the number that matters is the lowest speed you heard the word at before the guess that got it, so nudging the dial up just before you answer doesn't inflate the result.

If your device is muted. A listen counts when the word is sent, not when you hear it, so if your device's media volume is muted or at zero, a play that would use a listen first asks "Your device appears to be muted", with Play anyway and Cancel. Cancel plays nothing and uses nothing. Play anyway isn't asked again for the rest of that visit. Replays after you've solved the word are free and never ask.

Sharing it

When you get it, the result card shows the word, the lowest speed you heard it at, and what it cost in guesses and listens, and the app builds two things to share. One is an image: a card in the app's colors with the puzzle number, the speed, the guess and listen counts, your guess grid as colored tiles with each row's sending speed beside it, and a link back here. It carries no letters, so it spoils nothing. The other is a pasteable result: a headline with the puzzle number, that speed and the two counts, then one emoji row per guess, then a link back here. Share sends the image with the text as its caption, and Copy puts the image on the clipboard with the text alongside it. The headline reads like this:

Daily Dit #245 — 50 WPM · 4 guesses · 4 listens

Play with the chart hidden and "(no reference)" is added to it. The text is plain on purpose, so it survives anywhere the image can't go: Copy puts the card on the clipboard with the text as a fallback, so pasting into a chat that takes pictures gives the card and pasting into a plain text field gives the text; Share hands the card and the text to whatever you pick. Both work the same way on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android. Replays after the win are free and don't change the count.

The word is chosen from the date on your own device, not from a server, so it works offline and everyone playing on the 3rd gets the 3rd's word, on iPhone and Android alike. Puzzle #1 was January 1st, 2026. The next puzzle arrives at midnight, your time, even if you leave the app open.

Back-to-back items with no gap to recover in: contest conditioning.

A continuous stream sent at your chosen pace. Choose what to copy and how to answer:

Then pick how to answer: type each one as you hear it, head-copy then type, key each one back, or just listen and review the transmitted list afterwards. The pace between items is adjustable, so tighten it as you improve, and call signs come in the shapes you pick (US-only or with DX prefixes, from chips on the setup screen). All of it, including the two toggles, is remembered between sessions.

The full simulator: you call CQ, stations answer, and you work them. This is the mode that turns copying into operating.

Set your callsign in Settings › QSO & Pileups (it starts as W1AW) and it's used throughout, sent when you call CQ and work stations. The first time you open Pileup Runner or Contest (which sends your callsign too) with the callsign still unset, it asks: Set up your station? takes your callsign, and optionally your name and state, and saves them there. Not now closes it, and it isn't asked again either way. With Key my side in Morse on, your own side is keyed on the air, so you hear the whole exchange as it would sound; off, your CQ, calls and TU are logged silently.

Type what you want to send, or key it on a hardware key: what you key is decoded into the box and sent when you stop keying. Keying CQ when no station is being worked calls CQ. A keyed send isn't keyed again by Key my side in Morse, since you already heard it as sidetone.

Eight exchange flavors

Realism controls

This is where it stops being a quiz. All of these are adjustable:

• Max callers: a cap of 1 to 8 stations answering at once. Lower it mid-run and the surplus callers are sent away straight away, never the one you're working.
• Speed band and tone spread: callers at different speeds (12 to 60 WPM) and different pitches across the band, with their own Farnsworth switch. Zero-beat stacks them all on your exact pitch, which is far harder.
• Wait between callers: the minimum and maximum pause before the next station calls.
• QSB (fading): signals rise and fall mid-exchange.
• QRN (noise): atmospheric noise at selectable levels.
• Cut numbers: digits sent as letters to save time (0→T, 9→N), with a switch per digit for which ones get cut. You can type either form.
• Bust behavior: what happens when you get a call wrong, and whether stations give up and drop out after you keep busting them.
• Who got away: when a caller runs out of patience and leaves, this decides whether you hear about it. At the end (the default) lists the ones who walked in the run summary, along with what you had them as. As it happens also raises a banner mid-run naming the call. Off keeps the run uninterrupted.
• Keep partial call: a partly-copied call stays in the box so you can send ? and add to it rather than retyping from scratch.
• Callsign shapes: US-only, or mix in DX prefixes.

A live log and rate readout run alongside. With Pileup re-calls after TU on, the stations still waiting call again on their own once you log a contact, so the run keeps moving; off, you send AGN or CQ yourself.

When your copy is close but wrong

The pileup answers a miscopy the way an operator would rather than treating everything short of perfect as a total bust:

• A near miss gets corrected. Send W1AQ for W1AW and that station comes back with its own call again, and keeps sending it until you get it right. It still counts as a bust and still spends the station's patience, so a caller you never resolve will eventually walk, but you get the chance to fix it.
• An ambiguous copy brings back both. If what you sent sits equally close to two calls, both answer, because neither knows which you meant. Refusing to guess is your job, not the pileup's. Neither one gives up its exchange until you actually name one, so you cannot end up working a station you never copied.
• A partial works from anywhere in the call. Querying the middle or the end is ordinary contest practice: 1A? is how you ask W1AW to come back. The fragment no longer has to be the start of the call.
• A partial can have a hole in it. A ? anywhere in what you send marks a gap, so N?O brings back every call that starts with N and ends with O. And a fragment doesn't have to be consecutive: send NO? and any call carrying those letters in that order answers.

A timed run at a real weekly event, scored the way the real one scores.

Five actual contests, each with its authentic exchange, speed range and scoring:

Pick your run length, and a live score and rate update as you work stations. At the end you get a scorecard.

You work stations the way you do in Pileup Runner: type what you send, or key it on a hardware key and it's sent when you stop keying, with keyed CQ calling CQ when no one is being worked.

Why bother: a real contest is unforgiving of hesitation, and there's no way to practice that pressure by copying single characters. A 20-minute SST run before your first real one is worth a great deal of nerve.

The historical FCC code test, graded the way the ARRL VEC graded it.

The US code requirement was dropped in 2007, so this is a personal benchmark rather than a license requirement, but it's a well-defined, honest one. Roughly five minutes of plain-language text styled as an on-air QSO, with callsigns, names, locations and rig details.

Like the real exams, every passage, generated or built-in, includes every letter and numeral, the period, comma, question mark and slash (a portable call such as K9LA/4), and the prosigns BT between sections, AR at the end of the message and SK on the final over. The prosigns are sent run together, as one character, and shown as <BT>, <AR> and <SK> when you reveal the text.

Every exam runs the way the real one did. Play the transmission and type what you copy. Then hand your copy in and fill in ten blanks about the message: the sending station's call, the signal report, name, QTH, rig, power, antenna, weather, temperature and age. Your copy stays on screen while you answer, because candidates answered from their copy sheet. Answers ignore case and spacing, but otherwise must match what was sent: 72F is not 72. The call sign is right with or without its portable suffix. If you copied on paper or in your head, leave the copy blank and go straight to the questions.

Two ways to pass

As with the ARRL VEC, either one passes. The results show both grades and say which one passed.

• Solid copy: one minute of unbroken copy at the exam's speed. That's five characters a word, so 25 at 5 WPM, 65 at 13 WPM and 100 at 20 WPM. The 5 WPM bar follows the 5 WPM overall speed, not the faster 13 WPM characters. Characters are counted the ARRL way. A letter counts one. A numeral, a punctuation mark (period, comma, question mark, slash) or a prosign counts two. So a run that mixes in a call sign or an RST reaches the bar in fewer keystrokes. Spaces between words have to be in the right place, but they count nothing.
• Questions: 7 of the 10 blanks right.

Prosigns count

The ARRL graded prosigns as part of the copy, so copy them. Write <AR>, <BT> and <SK> in brackets, or + for AR and = for BT. The copy keyboard row has <AR>, <BT> and <SK> keys. Left out, a prosign breaks your run there, like any missed character. The letters AR without brackets are just A and R (Arkansas, say), never the prosign.

You can also choose a built-in passage instead of a freshly generated one, if you'd rather practice a known text.

Live CW with real people over the internet. No license, no radio, no antenna.

Connects to the Vail network, where anyone with a key can call. What you send goes out to everyone on the channel; what they send comes back to you. It's the closest thing to being on the air without being on the air.

• Server picker and a private-channel option: set a channel name and you and a friend have the frequency to yourselves. Ideal for scheduled practice with someone at your level.
• Signal timeline: a visual trace of what's arriving, so you can see the rhythm as well as hear it.
• Chat alongside the CW, for when you need to say something in plain text, with an unread badge so you notice a message that arrived while you were keying.
• Who's on: a roster of the stations on the channel. A station that's gone quiet drops off it after a minute.
• Straight key or paddles: the on-screen key is whichever you chose in Settings › Keys & Sending, and the paddles' keyed elements go out on the air exactly as straight-key presses would.
• Vail Adapter support: MIDI key input and output, keyer modes and speed, sidetone, and the RX piezo buzz (which you can turn off). The sidetone ducks other audio rather than taking it over, so a radio app can keep running underneath.

Hear it, key it back. Sending and receiving reinforce each other.

A dedicated mode on the adaptive ladder: the app sends a character or word, you key it back, and it decodes what you actually sent and tells you. Not what you meant to send, but what you sent. That feedback loop is what fixes sloppy timing.

• Live decode as you key, so you see your sending rendered back as text in real time.
• Always-on replay: re-hear the target as often as you want.
• Connected MIDI key readout: shows what hardware the app can see, so you know the key is actually talking to it, and says when MIDI itself is unavailable on the device as opposed to no key being connected.

Works with the on-screen touch key (a straight key, or a pair of touch paddles) or a hardware key. Most people's sending is worse than they think, and the live decode is a fast, slightly humbling way to find out.

Printable practice sheets, for keying away from the app.

Generates a sheet of random character groups you can print or share, then key from at your own bench with a real key and no screen involved. Three kinds:

• Studied: drawn from the characters you've actually learned, evenly weighted.
• Personalized: weighted toward the characters you're currently weakest on.
• Numbers & punctuation: the parts everyone neglects until a contest exchange goes wrong.

Send a whole text on your own key and find out exactly how it came out: which characters, and how good your spacing was.

The app shows a text, you send it, and it copies you the way a listener would. Then it lines up what it copied against the text and takes your timing apart. Open it from the gauge icon in the top bar on iPhone, iPad and Mac, or the Sending Analyzer tile on Android.

Setting up

• Send this: a pangram (JACKDAWS LOVE MY BIG SPHINX OF QUARTZ among them), five call signs, six common words, five groups of five from the characters you've studied, or your own text. New text draws another.
• Your key: straight key, bug, cootie, or paddles through a keyer. This decides what is fair to judge. A straight key or cootie is judged on everything. A bug makes its own dits, so only your dahs and spacing are judged. A keyer makes all the elements and sets the speed, so only your spacing between characters and words is judged; the element figures are still shown.
• Input: Key is the on-screen key, a Vail adapter or another MIDI key, wired or Bluetooth. The on-screen key is a straight key or a pair of paddles, whichever you chose in Settings › Keys & Sending › On-screen key. The on-screen paddles' keyer times every dit and dah at your Settings › Speed & Timing speed, so an attempt sent on them is judged as paddles, spacing only, whatever Your key says; the setup says so when the paddles are on. With the Vail adapter, set its keyer mode in Settings › Keys & Sending › Keyer mode to match your key; in a paddle mode the adapter keys at your Settings › Speed & Timing speed. Microphone listens for a tone instead: see below.
• Judged against: the speed your sending is compared with (20 WPM to start, 5 to 50), and an optional Farnsworth spacing switch with its own effective speed. With Farnsworth on, character and word spacing are judged in stretched spacing units, so 3 and 7 are still the targets.

Sending

Tap Start sending and send the text. What the app has copied so far appears as you go. Once you've sent as many characters as the text has, a pause of a second and a half or so (longer at slow speeds) finishes the attempt by itself; Finish ends it early and Cancel throws it away.

The results

• Correct, char WPM and overall WPM: the share of the text's characters you got right; the speed your elements were sent at (from your average dit); and your overall pace, the standard length of what you sent over the time it took, which is lower than the character speed when your spacing is stretched.
• What you sent: the text with every mistake marked. Red is a character sent as something else, orange is one left out (or a word break sent too short, so two words ran together), gray is something extra (or a gap inside a word long enough to read as a break). Below it, each mistake is spelled out with both patterns, such as 8 (−−−··) sent as 7 (−−···).
• Feedback: plain sentences about what to fix: dahs short or long against the 3:1 ratio, dits or dahs that vary a lot, gaps inside characters clipped or stretched, character or word spacing short, long or uneven, and speed well off the one you set. Each needs a few examples before it speaks up. A clean attempt says so.
• Spacing: a histogram of the gaps between characters, centered on 3 units, and another of the gaps between words, centered on 7, with the average and spread of each. A tall, narrow bar on the bright one is the goal.
• Elements: average dit and dah in milliseconds and in units of the speed you set, the dah-to-dit ratio, and the gap inside characters.

How it decides: dits and dahs are told apart by their lengths as you actually sent them, not by a fixed speed, and are measured separately, which is what lets a bug's quick machine dits and slower hand dahs both be read correctly. A gap under two units is inside a character, and one of five or more (spacing) units is a word break.

Your sending over time

Every attempt is added to a running record under the results: the characters and the letter pairs (like LL) you miss most often once you've tried them at least three times, the mix-ups you make (which character came out instead of which), and your last few attempts. It's kept apart from the confusion matrix that drives the copying drills, because a slip of the hand is a different mistake from a slip of the ear. Clear sending record wipes it, and so does resetting all progress.

Using the microphone

Choose Microphone to send on anything the phone can hear: a practice oscillator, an electronic keyer's sidetone, a rig's speaker, or a signal generator. The app finds the pitch itself (anything from 300 to 1200 Hz) and times each key-down and key-up from the audio. A light follows the tone, and a meter shows its level against the room's, marked in orange. Key a few characters before you start: the light should come on with every element and stay off in the gaps. If it flickers in the gaps, lower the Sensitivity; if it misses quiet elements, raise it. If it has locked onto the wrong sound, Find pitch again starts the search over. The microphone is only used while the Sending Analyzer is open with Microphone chosen.

Point the microphone at received Morse and read it as text.

Open it from the waveform icon in the top bar. Hold the phone near your rig's speaker, or play a WebSDR through anything, and it decodes what it hears. Live WPM and pitch telemetry show what it's locked onto, and a two-core pitch-lock rescue helps it hang on when the signal wanders.

Noise

Static crashes (QRN) are what confuse a decoder most: each crash lands in the tone detector as a short spurious mark, splitting a character or adding a stray E. Both apps run a noise blanker ahead of the decoder. It catches each crash where it is unmistakable, in the wideband signal rather than at the tone's pitch, and while the crash lasts it substitutes the tone's own continuation, so a crash inside a dah fills the hole instead of breaking it, and a crash in a gap stays a gap. It is always on and has no setting. Steady hiss is left to the decoder, which copes with it on its own down to a poor signal-to-noise ratio. What the blanker cannot save is a band so busy that a third of the time is crash, or another station on the same pitch. Hold the phone close enough that the code sits well above the room, and if your rig has a noise blanker of its own, use it too.

The lookup table you're allowed to use, because looking something up isn't the same as learning by chart.

A browsable, tap-to-hear chart. Tap any row and it's sent, so you can attach a sound to it rather than a written pattern. Six categories:

Practice with your hands and eyes busy: driving, walking, washing up.

Code plays, then the answer is spoken aloud. No interaction at all. It keeps playing with the screen locked, with full background audio and lock-screen controls, so it works with the phone in your pocket. The lock screen, CarPlay and a Bluetooth car display show the current item as the track title (the revealed answer once it has been spoken, "Listening…" before that) with the app logo as the artwork, so a head unit no longer keeps the last podcast's cover up.

It deals the whole pool like a deck of cards, every item once before anything repeats, and the word source is the full 1000-word list, so a long commute doesn't circle back to the same dozen words.

• What it announces: choose the content it draws from. Characters is your active Koch set; QSO elements · Top 20 and QSO elements · Top 100 are the on-air vocabulary below; CW 77 (CWOps) is the CW Academy list below; Words is the 1000-word list; Abbreviations & Q-codes is the same table the Abbreviations and Q-Codes drills use.
• Gap before the spoken answer: how long you get to answer in your head before it tells you. Four tiers: Standard 1.3 s, Rapid Fire 1.0 s, Warp 0.5 s, ICR-Territory 0.2 s.
• Readback (QSO elements, CW 77 and Abbreviations & Q-codes only): Spell it out reads the token letter by letter and then its full meaning, "k n, go ahead, named station only"; Meaning only says the short meaning and nothing else, "go ahead", so a drilling session moves at the pace of the code rather than the gloss. The screen shows the token and the whole meaning either way.

QSO elements

Dictionary words are poor practice for the air: nobody sends GOVERNMENT in a contact. The two QSO elements sets are one curated list of the hundred things you actually hear, ordered most common first, so Top 20 is the skeleton of every contact and Top 100 adds the rest of a ragchew, a DX exchange and the weather. The first twenty, in order:

CQ  DE  <K>  <KN>  <AR>  <SK>  <BK>  TU  73  RST  599  5NN  UR  NAME  QTH  HR  ES  HW?  R  TNX

Prosigns are sent run-together and shown in angle brackets; a few items are short phrases (CQ CQ CQ, TNX FER CALL, 5NN TU) sent with their word gaps. The reveal shows the token and its meaning, and speaks the token letter by letter and then the meaning, exactly as the Abbreviations set does: "q t h, my location is". Switch Readback to Meaning only once you know the tokens and it says just "my location is". Both apps have both sets.

CW 77

CW 77 (CWOps) is the list of the most-used words and abbreviations in a CW contact that CW Academy advisors have their students listen to. The list as circulated has 75 entries with five repeats, so the set is the 70 distinct items, in the list's order, keeping the familiar name:

VVV  VERT  OM  HR  XYL  QTH  RR  AGE  FB  LID  QSL  TKS  RIG  QSB  CQ  CL  <KN>  NAME  PKT  QSO  TEST  DE  <BT>  73  QRM  BK  AGN  DIPOLE  <SK>  HW?  QRP  TNX  YRS  YL  QRX  QRL  ES  WX  QRT  K  QRS  88  PWR  RUNS  CALL  VY  WIRE  YAGI  NR  RPT  OP  <AR>  PSE  EL  LOOP  ABT  QSY  TU  HI  BEAM  RST  WATT  <AS>  TEMP  CPY  QRZ  ANT  QRN  CW  DX

The five prosigns, <AR> <AS> <BT> <KN> <SK>, are sent run-together as they are on the air; BK and CL are sent as the letter abbreviations for break and closing. It is revealed and spoken like the QSO elements, token then meaning, or the meaning alone with Readback on Meaning only. Common Words can drill the same list, and the CW 77 tile runs it either way as a mode of its own.

• Use 40 WPM, no Farnsworth: Bob Carter WR7Q recommends hearing this list at 40 WPM with no Farnsworth spacing. With CW 77 chosen, one tap sets your speed to that (it changes the speed in Settings › Speed & Timing, which you can move back any time); once you're there it says so instead.
• Include my callsign and name (off by default): adds your own call and name to the set, the two things you'll hear most often on the air. Type them in the Callsign and Name fields just above the switch. They're Your callsign and Your name from Settings › QSO & Pileups, so changing one place changes both. The switch appears once either is set; a callsign still at the W1AW placeholder doesn't count, and with no name set only your callsign is added.

Passive practice isn't as effective as active drilling, but it's dramatically better than not practicing, and it turns dead time into reps. A commute a day adds up quickly.