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Category: Ham Radio Education & Exam Prep Materials

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Review Summary For : Morse Fusion
Reviews: 1MSRP: $10 to $15 per month subscriptio
Description:
Morse code practice tool for learning to copy in your head.
Product is not in production
More Info: http://www.morsefusion.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0013
KC3BKJ Rating: 2016-09-01
For The Gifted Only Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
This product seems to be based on a plausible concept but ignores some of the realities of Morse code practice.

The course is specifically designed for people who want to learn how to copy in their head, without pencil and paper, by just hearing and comprehending what is being sent; unquestionably the highest aptitude of CW.

It is based on the idea that one must first be able to hear and comprehend English words spelled out one letter at a time the way parents often do at the dinner table to go above the heads of their young kids. Good concept! Mental recognition of spelled out words is the first step to head copying; whether as uttered letters or as code, it amounts to the same thing.

You start out by hearing everything in spoken characters. Then what the program does is to allow the student to substitute his/her choice of code characters into the text, thereby slowly eliminating spoken letters for code. The bulk of the program makes use of familiar works of literature broken down into uttered characters, plus there are two practice volumes of random three and four letter words.

Before explaining the main flaw of this program, it should be obvious that the first task of mastering code is character recognition. Once this is done, word recognition begins to develop. Finally, and most important, is sentence comprehension. Put simply, all of your abilities to hear and understand characters and words in Morse, is useless unless you can comprehend the sentence being sent.
Otherwise how would you respond to a sender's question of – "What kind of antenna are you using today?" That being said, here's my first problem with this program.

"In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes." Comprehend that sentence? It may be from - A Tale of Two Cities, but it beats the Dickens out of me. Let's try another.

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses…" This is from Moby Dick, one of the most complex works of literature in the English language. If you can understand every sentence of Melville, you have truly conquered English.

Get the point? If sentence comprehension is the final test of CW head copying, why would you choose as practice material the mind blowing works of Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells? Most people can't comprehend this stuff in just reading it. Bottom line – Morse Fusion's choice of material is an unnecessary distraction.

As far as the two volumes of three and four letter random words, what good is that? By themselves, the words are much easier than real world copying and because they are random, there's no comprehension practice to be had.

The program writers should have made up their own sentences, preferably typical of a QSO or they should have simply gotten permission to copy articles from the ARRL journal. Or, they should have just found themselves an old eight grade anthology. If you listen to 40 meter rag chews, with the exception of ham nomenclature, the vocabulary doesn't rise much above that. Here's the other problem I have with this program.

One of the reasons for the CW protocol of repeating a number is to allow the copier to shift to the necessary highly focused mindset of numeric copying as in - You heard the number, but you're not quite sure you got every character right. Here it comes again. Now focus!

After setting the program to replace all of the vowels with code, I tried copying in my head at the lowest speed of 15 WPM. I simply could not do it. I found that shifting from spoken characters to code was ten times more distracting than going from alpha to numeric in pure code. I actually find it easier to copy pure code simple sentences in my head at 10 to 12 WPM.

Finally, in all fairness, copying in your head is a natural gift. You either have it or you very likely don't. Most people who pursue CW are forever stuck with pencil and paper but have just as much fun as everyone else. Therefore, I highly recommend trying this program, not just for the free trial, but more importantly, if you do indeed have this natural gift, you will never know it until you try it, even if it means having to learn Shakespeare or interpreting the Old Testament.

I quit because I know I don't have this gift. How do I know? When people spell above the heads of their kids, I'm usually there lost with the kids.