Dot Dash vs Farnsworth Morse

Every letter has a rhythm. Dot Dash helps you learn Morse code the way operators always have: by ear, by touch, by repetition. The practice surface is a brass telegraph key from the 1920s, drawn to work like the real thing. Tap it for a dot. Hold it for a dash. It clicks under your thumb, and on iPhones that support it you feel the rhythm as haptics too. A short walkthrough shows you dots and dashes the first time you open the app, and then you choose a tier and go: Easy, for listening. Ten common letters with their patterns always visible. Perfect for your first session. Medium, for learning. The full alphabet. Patterns fade as you tap, so your memory does the work. Hard, for remembering. Letters and numbers, by sound and feel alone. You are hearing the rhythm now. Three speed presets change the room between the marks inside each letter, so a new learner has time to think while every letter keeps its real shape. A full reference chart is one tap away, and tapping any letter plays its rhythm out loud. When a session ends you get a recap in plain English, plus a short quote from the history of telegraphy. Every quote is real, sourced, and public domain. Send a telegram. Pick one of a hundred short phrases, from GOOD MORNING to GOOSE ON THE LOOSE, and Dot Dash paints it in Morse above a brass key, ready to share or save. No typing, nothing stored. The Operator's Pack, if you want more. A one-time purchase adds callsign drills: hear a whole call sign at 5, 13 or 20 words per minute with true Farnsworth spacing, then key it back one letter at a time. It also adds four more app icons and seventeen more sounds for the key. Sixty percent of what is left after costs from every Operator's Pack is committed to CommunicationFIRST, a civil rights organization for people who cannot rely on speech alone to be heard and understood, and every tenth purchase commits the whole remainder. Quarterly receipts: sillydroose.com/donations/dotdash. No scores. No timers. No streaks. Nothing to keep up with. Just you and the pattern. Dot Dash works entirely offline and collects nothing. I built it because Morse is a small, beautiful skill, and learning it should feel like tapping out messages by lamplight, not grinding a curriculum. The practice is free, and it stays free. No ads. No data collected. Ever.

Farnsworth Morse teaches you to hear Morse code, and translates it while you learn. THE TRAINER Morse is not read, it is heard. A character sent at fifteen words a minute is a shape you recognise the way you recognise a spoken word; the same character sent slowly is a row of dots you count, and counting is the habit that stops people at ten words a minute and keeps them there. So the trainer uses the Koch method, which starts you at full character speed on the very first lesson with two letters, K and M. When you copy those at ninety percent, it adds a third. Nothing gets faster as you improve, because it was already fast — what grows is the alphabet. The gap between characters is yours to set. That is Farnsworth timing: characters at, say, twenty words a minute with the silence stretched to give ten overall, so you have time to think without ever learning to count. The spacing follows the ARRL standard, and the timing is measured against it rather than approximated. THE TRANSLATOR Type text and read the Morse, or paste Morse and read the text. Play it at any speed and any pitch. The reference chart covers letters, digits, punctuation, accented characters and prosigns, and it marks the ones the ITU recommendation does not define rather than passing them off as standard. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No ads. No purchases. No accounts, no sign-in, no nicknames. Nothing about you is collected or sent, and the app contacts no third party at all — no analytics, no advertising, nothing borrowed from anyone else. It works offline after the first visit. Progress stays on your device.