Experimental tool
This is the replacement for the QSO Trainer and is not finished. It will eventually take over that page.
Practise copying whole, realistic QSOs. Every contact is generated from scratch: the callsign picks the country, the country picks the town and the operator’s name, the town’s climate and the season pick the weather, and the years licensed constrain the age and the rig. Copy what matters into the log card and the tool marks it, field by field.
The formats and conventions the tool generates are surveyed, with sources, in CW QSO Formats and Conventions — including a table of exactly which convention each format here uses.
Your station
The QSOs are addressed to you, so they need your callsign at least. This is stored in your browser and shared with the other trainers on this site; it is never sent to the server.
Who you talk to
Callsigns are generated from real on-air activity, so you hear the prefixes you would actually work rather than an even spread of every country.
The other operator's fist and speed. More detailed settings can be found in the
Band conditions
Make the Morse sound like it came off the air rather than out of a signal generator: atmospheric noise, fading, a receiver filter, and other operators on the band. The noise floor is calculated from the location, season and the time of day.
The “detailed settings” in the dialog exposes more settings for the radio band, your station and the channel.
What to practise Where these formats come from
Style
Every named format sets these for you. Change them to hear how the same contact sounds under a different convention — the schools genuinely disagree, and it is worth being able to copy all of them.
How to practise
Each QSO
Practise
Review
Settings Help
Load some settings from a file (overwriting your current choices), or Save all the settings for this page in a file. Share Settings generates a link to bookmark your settings, insert into a document, or share with someone else. The Reset Settings button changes everything in this page to its default value.
Notes
The stations are invented, not copied from a list. The callsigns are built from the measured CW activity of real operators — so you hear DL1 far more often than DB1, and a M0 callsign almost always has a three-letter suffix — but the suffixes themselves are random, so no real operator’s callsign is ever deliberately transmitted.
Facts that are sent together agree with each other. Facts nobody transmits — such as what month it is — are deliberately not modelled: the season is drawn at random for each QSO so that you meet the whole weather vocabulary whatever the time of year.
Why these formats?
Because a club teaches each of them as a lesson. The Long Island CW Club’s “Preparing for On-Air Operating” carousel is five lessons — its own protocol, SKCC, SOTA, POTA and the K1USN SST — and CW Academy sessions 11 to 13 build a contact piece by piece. Those, plus the rubber-stamp QSO of the IARU’s operating manual and two formats at the fast end (CWT and a DX pile-up), are the ten here. Where they came from, with sources, is set out in CW QSO Formats and Conventions.
CW Academy is one format rather than three because its sessions 11, 12 and 13 are the exchange, the details and the sign-off of a single contact. Choose the part to get the session, and the same choice cuts every other format the same way — a POTA exchange without the CQ and the 73s, twenty times over, is the drill that format is for.
That rule leaves out the contest exchanges nobody teaches as a QSO: ARRL Field Day, CQ WW, CQ WPX. Each drills something this tool does not generate — a class and section (2A NC), a CQ zone, a serial number. For Field Day in particular the Word List Trainer is the better tool today: it carries the exchange, the ARRL sections, and a real log of 1,288 contacts from a 2022 Field Day station, which is more faithful than anything generated.
General
There are many . Press ? to list them.
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