About Morse Dojo
A free tool for learning morse code by ear, built because the good ones are old and the new ones teach it backwards.
What it is
Morse Dojo is a complete course and practice environment for learning morse code — the forty-lesson Koch method, 1,114 listening exercises with live marking as you type, a simulated radio band you can tune across, an analyser that tells you what your sending really sounds like, four games, a translator, a hearable reference chart, and a decoder that will read genuine off-air signals.
All of it is free. There is no account, no trial, no locked features and no upsell. It is paid for by the advertising you can see on the page, and nothing else.
Who built it
Somebody who supervised naval communications for a living, which is the reason this site is opinionated about things other morse sites treat as details: that spacing matters more than speed, that procedure signals are heard as shapes rather than spelled out, that a distress call is not something you send as a test, and that the gap between characters is where the skill actually lives.
It also means the historical material here — the commercial and maritime signals in particular — comes from somebody who worked the real thing rather than only read about it. Where something on that page is still wrong, it is wrong because nobody has pointed it out yet, so please do.
Why it teaches by ear
Most morse sites lead with a chart of dots and dashes. That is the fastest way to make somebody feel like they are learning and the slowest way to make them able to copy. Reading the chart builds a translation step — hear the beeps, picture the pattern, look up the letter — that works at five words a minute and becomes a hard ceiling at ten. Getting past it means unlearning the habit, which takes longer than never forming it.
So this site opens with a sound and never shows you a dot unless you ask. The chart is here to look things up and to print, not to memorise. Every character plays at full speed from your first lesson, with Farnsworth spacing stretching only the silence between them, so the rhythm you learn on day one is the rhythm you will use at thirty words a minute.
How it is built
Static HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no dependencies, no server, no database and no accounts. The whole site is about 340 kilobytes and it will keep working, unchanged, for as long as browsers have a Web Audio API.
There is not a single audio file in it. Every exercise is text, and the sound is synthesised in your browser as you listen. That is the most important decision in the build: a recording has one speed baked into it forever, and speed is the one thing a learner needs to change every week. Generating the audio means a thousand exercises cost nothing to download, every one plays at whatever speed and pitch suit you today, and you can still export any of them as a real .wav file for your phone.
The timing is exact rather than approximated. A dit is one unit, a dah is three, and the word PARIS is fifty units — which is the actual definition of words per minute. Twenty wpm here is twenty wpm on any other piece of morse equipment you will meet.
What it deliberately does not do
- It does not pretend to receive radio. No web page can. The band simulator is a model — an honest one, where signals separate by pitch as you tune past them exactly as they do on a real receiver, but a model. For genuinely live signals the site points you at public web receivers run by other people and decodes what they are hearing.
- It does not track you. No analytics, no pixels, no fingerprinting. Your progress, streak and settings live in your own browser and are never uploaded. See the privacy policy for the exact list.
- It does not put adverts in your way. None appear inside a drill, none move once loaded, and none sit between you and the thing you are trying to hear.
Corrections and contact
Morse is a field full of people who know more than the person who built the tool they are using, and that is welcome. If something here is wrong — a code, a Q signal, a piece of history, a timing that does not match your rig — please say so and it will be fixed.
Bug reports are just as welcome, particularly anything about audio behaving oddly on a browser or device combination that is hard to test. Say what you heard and what you expected; that is usually enough to find it.
Email: hello@morsedojo.com
Run by a former Radio Supervisor in the Royal Navy — carriers, frigates, minesweepers and fast patrol boats — a Geordie by birth, now living in Ireland.