One of my other interests is amateur radio and to upgrade my licence, I once tried to get to 12 words per minute standard (around 30 years ago) - I wasn't particularly keen on Morse and got to a 'plateau' of around 10 wpm. I can still remember around 80% of the letters withought significant thought, so can readily tell whether I've got totally the wrong beacon!!
It's generally not too difficult to get up to around 5 wpm - a little bit of concentrated practice with pre-recorded tapes (no more than about 5 hrs) should get you up to a suitable standard. For info, I would estimate that the speed of transmission of aviation beacon idents is around 3 wpm or so (for Morse purposes, a word is taken to average 5 characters). A few pointers:
- Think of each letter in its entirety of dots and dashes, so that a letter is recalled as a pattern, rather than individual dot / dash components. eg. C is Dah-di-dah-dit
- There are several 'families' of letters (eg E, I, S and H, which are 1,2 3 and 4 dots respectively). Try to learn the letters as families, or there are some which are 'matching pairs' (eg F and L are Di-di-da-dit and Di-dah-di-dit respectively).
- Try and think of a phrase with the same rhythm as the Morse letter (eg for F and L above, I was taught them as 'Did it hurt you' and 'Like hell it did' !!).
The pre-recorded tapes and training books are farily easy to obtain. A search on Google for 'Morse Training Tapes' resulted in quite a few US results, generally indicating a price of around $30 for a 5wpm tape. There was also a tape from a well known UK publisher of flight guides beginning with P at a cost of £8.07.
A couple of interesting pages about learning Morse are attached:
Link for Morse Tips
Page of Morse Links
There are also a few freeware programs around that will do Text to Morse conversions. An example is at this site:
Freeware Text to Morse MIDI Application
An alternative source in the UK is the Radio Society of Great Britain [RSGB], which won't tend to financially penalise the aviation user!