Morse Dojo · Independent
Morse code,
trained by ear
A midnight training hall for the oldest digital mode — full-speed audio from the first day, a belt ladder over the Koch method, and a straight key that grades your rhythm, not just your answer.
My own product: the timing engine, the game design, and the amber-on-black room it lives in. There is no backend and nothing to sign up for — your training record never leaves your browser.
- 20 wpm
- character speed, day one
- 10
- belts on the Koch ladder
- 0
- servers, all on-device
Learned by ear, not from a chart
Every Morse chart is a trap. Learn the symbols visually and you end up counting dits in your head forever, capped at whatever speed counting allows. The people who actually use CW know each character as a sound, the way you know a word.
So the dojo never slows the characters down. They sound at twenty words per minute from the first minute — only the silence between them stretches while you learn, then closes as you climb. That's the Koch and Farnsworth methods, older than most radios, finally dressed like a game.
The game mechanics are the pedagogy
Instead of bolting points onto flashcards, every system maps onto how the skill is actually built. The combo meter rewards answering without hesitation, which is the real skill: instant recognition. Characters you neglect fade over the days and start coming up more often — spaced repetition wearing a gi.
Belts are earned in a one-shot grading: one passage, sent once, three attempts a day. The scarcity is the point. A belt you can retry forever isn't worth wearing.
A key that shows you your fist
Sending is a rhythm skill, and “wrong, try again” teaches rhythm badly. Work the straight key and your keying is drawn on a timeline against a ghost of the ideal — you see that your dah came up forty milliseconds short instead of being told you failed.
The key adapts its dot-dash threshold to your hand instead of a fixed timing, and letters commit themselves when you pause, no submit button — the same contract as a real operator's fist. It's also the hero of the landing page: the key is live before you've clicked anything.