How to Use CW Forge

What CW Forge is

CW Forge teaches you Morse code by ear, in your browser. There is nothing to install, no account to make, and it is free. It also does something most trainers cannot: it listens to your straight key through your computer’s microphone and tells you whether you are actually sending it right.

CW is just the on-air name for Morse code. It stands for “continuous wave”, which describes how the signal is made. You do not need to know that to use this — but now you do.

What you need

  • To learn and listen: nothing but this page and some speakers or headphones.
  • To have your sending graded: a straight key plugged into a practice oscillator — the little box that makes the beep — sitting near your microphone. You do not connect anything to the computer. The microphone simply hears the beeping, the same way it would hear you talking.

Any built-in laptop or webcam microphone will do. So will a good one. The app works out your oscillator’s pitch by itself.

Start here: three steps

  1. Open the Learn tab and press Start. It will send you two letters, over and over, in random order. Type what you hear.
  2. When you are getting 90% right, it gives you a third letter. Then a fourth. That is the whole method.
  3. Do fifteen minutes a day. Fifteen minutes daily beats two hours on a Sunday, every single time.

Why it starts so fast

The letters are sent at 20 words per minute from your very first session, with long gaps between them. That is deliberate, and it is the single most important thing on this page.

If you learn Morse slowly, you learn to count the dots and dashes. That works up to about 10 words per minute and then it stops working forever, and you have to unlearn it. Sent at full speed, each letter has a rhythm — a shape your ear learns whole, like recognising a friend’s voice. The gaps between letters are what give you time to think, and the app stretches those instead. This is called Farnsworth timing.

So: if it feels too fast, slow down the overall speed, not the character speed. Leave the character speed at 20.

The tabs

  • Learn — the Koch method, one new character at a time. This is where you start and where you will spend most of your time.
  • Copy — practice on real material: words, callsigns, whole conversations. This is also where the Signal artifacts panel lives.
  • Key Coach — the microphone. It listens to your key and grades your sending.
  • Listen — paste in any text, or open a text file, and hear the whole thing in Morse with the characters lighting up as they are sent.
  • Parks — practice for Parks on the Air and Summits on the Air. Short, fast, realistic exchanges.
  • Progress — how you are doing on every character, and what to work on next.
  • Reference — the whole Morse alphabet. Tap any character to hear it.

Getting the Key Coach to hear you

This part is worth doing carefully once. After that it just works.

  1. Close Zoom, Teams, Discord and any other call app. This matters more than anything else here. Those apps take over your microphone and apply noise removal, which is designed to strip out steady tones — and a practice oscillator is a steady tone. Muting them is not enough. They have to be closed.
  2. Press Turn on the microphone and allow access when your browser asks.
  3. Press Set me up automatically and follow the two prompts. It will ask you to hold your key down so it can find your oscillator’s pitch, then ask for silence so it can measure your room.
  4. Start keying. If room noise is producing letters you did not send, raise Noise rejection a little. Around 30% suits most rooms.

Reading the Key Coach display

Underneath the trace you will see every element you sent, drawn to scale:

  • Green — a clear dit.
  • Blue — a clear dah.
  • Amber — an element that landed near the line between the two.

Amber is the useful colour. It means you held a dit about twice as long as your other dits, or cut a dah short, so the length landed in the no-man’s-land between them. Nothing can reliably decide what an element like that was meant to be — not this app, not any other decoder, and not a human ear on the other end of a contact. If you are getting wrong letters back, look for amber before you blame the software. Evening those out is the single biggest improvement you can make to your sending.

If it is still not reading your keying

  • It types E E E E over and over: it is hearing noise, not your key. Raise Noise rejection, and check that a call app is not holding the microphone.
  • It types nothing at all: your oscillator is probably too quiet or too far from the microphone. Move it closer or turn it up, then run the automatic setup again.
  • It gets some letters right and some wrong: look at the amber elements. That is usually your sending, and it is exactly what this tab is for.
  • Nothing happens when you allow the microphone: the page has to be on a secure (https) address for browsers to allow microphone access.

Making practice sound like the real thing

In the Copy tab you will find Signal artifacts. Machine-sent Morse is the cleanest, easiest Morse there is, and nobody on the air sends it. These switches put the imperfections back:

  • Straight key — human timing, never quite even.
  • Variable weight — dahs that are not the textbook three times a dit.
  • QRM — another station transmitting close by. (QRM is the on-air shorthand for interference from other stations.)
  • Chirp — the note sliding as the transmitter keys, which older or home-built radios do.
  • Pitch dither — a tone that will not sit still.
  • Speed dither — a sender who speeds up and drifts back.

Underneath are two meters. Band noise is how loud the band is underneath the signal, and signal strength is how strong the station is. These use S-readings, the same scale as the meter on a radio: S9 is a strong signal, S1 is barely there. Put a weak signal under a noisy band and you are working real DX.

Three buttons set everything at once: Back to a clean signal, Make it realistic, and Rough day on 40.

Leave all of this off while you are still learning characters. Once a set feels easy, switch on Make it realistic — it is the fastest way to turn practice copy into on-air copy.

Parks and summits

Parks on the Air (POTA) and Summits on the Air (SOTA) are programmes where people take a radio to a park or a mountain and make contacts from there. The exchanges are short, fast, and always the same shape, which makes them superb listening practice.

Choose Hunter and you are chasing an activator: copy their callsign, your signal report, the park or summit reference, and their state. Choose Activator and you are running the pileup: several stations call at once and you write down whoever you can pull out of it.

You are not trying to copy every letter. You are pulling four things out of the noise: who, how strong, which reference, and where. Miss a letter and let it go — the callsign always comes round again.

On phones and tablets

Everything works on a phone, a tablet, a Mac or a PC, including the microphone. The layout adapts to the screen. Headphones help a lot on a phone, because a phone speaker sitting next to a phone microphone will hear itself.

Your progress is yours

Everything is saved in your own browser on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and we cannot see it. That does mean progress does not follow you from your laptop to your phone, and that clearing your browser data clears it.

It is free

CW Forge is free, like everything else here, and it always will be. If it helps you get on the air, a tip is welcome but never expected. Getting more people sending CW is the point.