A typing test for a key. A set of words goes up, ten of them unless you say otherwise, you send them on the space bar, and the clock starts on your first press. With the crib shown the dits and dahs sit under every letter and you are practising your hand; with it hidden the word is all you get, and you are being asked whether you know the code.
Got a letter wrong? Send eight dits — the operator's error signal — and the word starts again. It costs you the seconds it takes, the way a correction costs you seconds on a typewriter, and the letters you already fumbled stay on the tally. Backspace clears a pattern you are part way through and nothing else.
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effective wpm
the whole run divided by the clock
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character wpm
what your dits alone imply
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per cent right
characters that arrived as asked
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seconds
first press to last release
The two speeds are the reading. If they are far apart the time is going into the silences, not the elements.
Slowest first
| char | code | units | sent | missed | wpm |
|---|
A character's own speed, measured from the moment you first pressed for it to the moment you first pressed for the next one, so the pause before it ends up on the character you were reaching for rather than on the one you had just finished. Its cost is its own elements plus the three units of silence that follow it.
A typing test has one speed in it. Morse has two, and telling them apart is the whole point of the bench. Character speed is what your elements imply: a dit is one unit, so the median of your dits fixes the unit and 1200 divided by it is the speed a receiving operator would call your code speed. Effective speed is what you actually got through: the units the run asked for, over the seconds it took you. The first is your hands, the second is your hands plus everything you did between them.
For a fluent operator the two are nearly the same number. For everybody else the second is a fraction of the first, because the elements come out at the speed they were drilled at and the gaps hold however long it takes to remember what comes next. Twenty words a minute of characters and six of throughput is a normal reading, and it says something a single number cannot: the drilling worked and the recall has not caught up.
Words per minute is a real unit here rather than a count of words, because morse defines one. The standard word is PARIS, which is exactly fifty units long counting the space after it, so a passage worth n units sent in t seconds went out at 60n/50t words a minute whatever the words were. The bench charges you for the characters it asked for and the three units of silence between each pair, and not for the space between words, because the next word opens the moment the last letter of this one lands and that space is never sent. A run keyed at strict timing on the dial therefore reads back exactly the dial's speed.
The score is measured, never dialled. The speed and spacing dials decide only where one letter ends and the next begins — they are the thresholds the decoder reads your silences against, and they are the same two dials, doing the same job, as on Morse Key, which loads the same alphabet, the same thresholds and the same key as this page. Set them wrong and your letters run together or break apart; the match button sets both to what the run just measured.