What a fist is, and why yours can be read
An operator's fist is the particular way they key: how long they hold a dah, how much air they leave between characters, where they hurry and where they hesitate. It is as individual as handwriting, and experienced operators genuinely recognise each other by it before a callsign is sent. During both wars, listening services identified individual enemy operators by fist alone and followed them from one station to another.
That is flattering when your sending is good and unforgiving when it is not — a poor fist is not a private matter, it is the first thing anyone hears about you.
The four ratios
Morse is built from one length, the dit, and everything else is defined against it. Sending well means holding four relationships steady:
- A dah is three dits. The commonest fault is dahs that are too short — around two — which makes B, D and G start to sound like each other's neighbours.
- The gap inside a character is one dit. Stretch it and a single letter falls apart into two.
- The gap between characters is three dits. This is the one that ruins most sending.
- The gap between words is seven dits. Skimp on it and every sentence arrives as one long word.
The score above weighs all four, plus how consistent your dits and dahs are, which matters as much as whether they are the right length. A fist that is uniformly ten per cent fast is easy to copy. One that wanders is not, even if it averages out correctly.
It is nearly always the spacing
Almost nobody has trouble with the difference between a dit and a dah — the hand learns that in an afternoon. What separates a readable fist from an unreadable one is the silence, and specifically the three-dit gap between characters.
Two failures, and they are opposites:
- Not enough gap and your characters run together. P sent with a short gap after it is not P and the next letter — it is one long unrecognisable character. Send too tight and the person copying you gets nonsense that looks like they cannot copy.
- Too much gap and a single character splits in two. This is the classic beginner's fault: thinking mid-character. Three dits of silence is a character boundary, and a receiver has no way to know you were only pausing to remember what comes next.
This is why the decoder above is deliberately literal. It reads what you actually sent, not what you meant, because a forgiving decoder would tell you your sending is fine right up until the moment a human tries to copy it.
Straight key or paddles
A straight key is a single lever and every element is timed by your hand — you make the dits and the dahs yourself. It is harder, it is where a bad fist comes from, and it is also the only way to develop real timing.
Iambic paddles have two contacts and a keyer generates perfectly timed elements for you: one side sends dits, the other dahs, and squeezing both alternates them. The elements are machine-perfect, so the ratios in the score above stop being your problem — but the spacing between characters is still entirely yours, and that is the part that was going wrong anyway.
Both are on this page. Space bar or the left mouse button for a straight key; Z and X, or the arrow keys, for the paddles.
Using your own key
A space bar is a poor imitation of a real key, and if you own one there are two ways to use it here without any special software.
Wire it to a keyboard encoder. A USB arcade or keyboard encoder board — around €10 — turns a switch closure into a keypress. Map your key to the space bar and this page works exactly as it does now, with the feel of real contacts under your hand. Worth checking one thing before buying: some cheap boards debounce for 20 to 50 milliseconds, which is longer than a dit at 25 words a minute and will wreck your sending. Look for one advertised as "zero delay", or a QMK-capable board where the debounce is configurable.
Or key a practice oscillator near the microphone. If you have a code practice oscillator, or a transceiver with a sidetone, the decoder will read it through your microphone with nothing wired to the computer at all. That reads your sending back to you, though it does not score it against a target the way this page does.
Learn to receive first
The conventional advice is right: get comfortable copying before you spend much time sending. Two reasons. You cannot hear what is wrong with your own sending until your ear knows what correct sounds like — and until then, every hour of practice is an hour of rehearsing whatever you are doing wrong. Practice makes permanent, not perfect.
The other is simpler. Sending badly at 20 words a minute is easy and copying at 20 is hard, so if you learn to send first you will spend a year calling people who cannot understand you.
If you have not started copying yet, the course is the place to begin. When your sending is steady, the mill is the other side of the same coin — copying a whole message without stopping, the way it was done at sea.