Chris,

Another way of looking at it is to practice to near perfection but then lapse into beauty.

Machine sent Morse is perfect, but it's soulless.  A Morse operator who tries to send perfectly but strays slightly is much more beautiful. That's why I like mechanical keys rather than electronic keyers.

Warts and all, errors and all, this sounds pretty good, I have some videos of straight key and sideswiper as well but I was in so much physical pain when the videos were taken, they're difficult for me to watch!
Semiautomatic key (Turn on captions): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r8JXr3I2ycQ&t=0

73
DR 

N1EA 

On Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 18:30 Chris R. NW6V <chrisrut7@gmail.com> wrote:
I would still prefer that the final judge be a human - even if it means being told something I don't want to hear :-) I've been there, eh? But learn I do. 

The ONLY reason Morse code, and we operators, were used beyond Morse's very first experiments in the early 1840s was because our brains were capable of decoding data at the "edges" of the network, where things were not reliable enough for direct data - i.e. machine to machine - connections. Morse survived because our brains made his system smart, while the others were not.

Our superior ability to provide error correction on the fly kept us relevant up until the mid-nineteen nineties when the network reliability - out to the edge - finally made us obsolete. The electronic network was now turtles all the way down. 

However, a computer will never be able to appreciate that code can be beautiful. I remember "Roy's" soliloquy at the end of Blade Runner - commenting on the passing of life, and the loss of the wonders he had seen... 

Anyway, computers make great training tools - and can provide feedback - but I believe the goal of all training should be to "Train the keyer in your brain" to know and good code as experience. We all know good code when we hear it - it "comes alive" in your brain. "Machine perfect" is not necessarily perfect - it does nothing to inspire wonder...

73 Chris NW6V
MorseBusters

On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 3:04 AM D.J.J. Ring, Jr. <n1ea@arrl.net> wrote:
Jude,

Most of the radio officers in UK and elsewhere went to maritime college for radio officers. The auditor was their Morse instructor during the two years of training, then they had to pass the post office examination (we had FCC) and since these were commercial licenses they were quite strict about their evaluations. 

These days, there are software programs like FISTCHECK. That can do the work.

I had a DGM SRT-2000 keyboard which could send and receive and when I was sending on my semiautomatic Vibroplex key, I would monitor it to improve my sending, at first even with practiced use, occasionally "C" would be decoded as "NN" I worked until the DGM SRT-2000 keyboard could copy me perfectly!

73
DR
N1EA 

On Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 00:07 Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> wrote:
Back in the day of the radio officers an electronic cw auditor
maybe would have been a useful training tool for the
time students started using a key.  The auditor could listen to keying and
output voice comments on problem keying as well as good keying practices
when heard.

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