Morse Tutor Program
'The CW Player'

Whilst searching through the gb7tut archives recently, I came across a nice little morse tutor program that had been sent out on the Packet Radio network quite some time ago.
This was a program that I had used quite often in the past, but following a hard disk crash on my main machine, I had feared that it was lost forever. However, having now
re-discovered it, I thought it would be worth sharing it with you - before I lose it again!

Written by French radio amateur Gabriel Rivat F6DQM - this compact little program is an absolute treat, with the installation consisting of merely decompressing the zip file, then clicking on the cwplayer.exe file to run it. Should you decide that you no longer want the program, then just delete the directory you have put it in. There's no 'uninstall program' or messy registry entries to worry about.

The program produces excellent morse through your system's sound card, with speeds variable between 10 and 24 words per minute. As you can see from the screen dumps below, the program is very flexible. The Menu allows you the choice of Letters, Figures,
Q-codes or Random characters. With the first three options, clicking on any of the characters in the right-hand pane will produce the equivelent morse. Selecting Random produces a continuous mixture of letters and numbers.

Clicking on any letter will produce the corresponding morse sound

Use this panel to practice your numbers and punctuation

Click on any line here to hear the sounds of the various Q-codes

In addition to the preset letters, numbers and Q-Codes, the program will also read virtually any text file and convert it to morse as it goes. Each letter is highlighted as it is read from the file, so that you can see exactly which letter is being sent to you, and at what position in the text you have reached.

But it doesn't stop there, try typing a letter or word into the Enter Text box. The program responds by producing the relevent morse sound each time you enter a letter. And.. if all that wasn't enough, you can continuously switch between any of the modes, jumping from random text to an external file, then back again. Quite impressive for such a small program.

In the Readme file included in the zip, Gabriel also gives details of how to connect your computer's Com port to your radio, thus allowing the program to key your transmitter.
This facility would allow you to transmit text from a pre-prepared file - something that would be quite useful in CW contests. A sample text file is also included in the zip, as is the circuit diagram below showing details of the Com port to transmitter connections.

Download the CWPlayer.zip file

Richard - G4TUT

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