Profile: morse¶
Morse code — sending, decoding, learning, and licence exam practice
Stage: 1.0
Who it is for¶
Someone learning Morse, practising speed, or studying for a licence exam. Nothing in it needs a radio.
At a glance¶
| Stage | 1.0 |
| Units | 17 |
| Disk | under 100 MB |
| Hardware | None for learning, which generates its own audio. Sending on the air needs a keying interface (a serial control line or a Winkeyer) and, for cwdaemon, membership of the group that owns it. |
| Consent | none |
| Install | hammunition install morse |
What it installs¶
Five ways to learn — Koch method training, high-speed callsign drilling, the three unixcw front ends, the long-lived Unix morse sounder that drills you on random groups, and a converter that turns any text you were going to read into Morse audio at a speed you choose. Two decoders, one live from a receiver and one offline from a recording. Two ways to send: a daemon that keys a transmitter for a logging program, and a control panel for a Winkeyer. A beacon monitor. And practice tests for the US and Canadian licence exams.
Disk footprint: Under 100 MB. Everything here is small; the largest single item is the wxWidgets front end for ebook2cw.
Why these belong together¶
Morse is a skill before it is a mode, and everything here is either practice, sending or copying. The licence exam tools are here because the Debian Hamradio Blend groups its morse and training tasks together and the same person wants both at the same stage — this is the profile someone installs while they are still learning. If the exam tools look out of place in something called morse, that is a fair reading and they are three packages you can remove.
Packages (17)¶
aldo, cw, cwcp, xcwcp, qrq, morse-classic, ebook2cw, ebook2cwgui, cwwav, cwdaemon, flwkey, morse2ascii, xdemorse, ibp, hamexam, canadian-ham-exam, fccexam
What it deliberately excludes¶
fldigi, which decodes CW among twenty other modes and belongs in digital-modes. Contest loggers, which key CW through cwdaemon and live in logging. morse-runner, the CW contest simulator, is carried and installs by name (hammunition install morse-runner) rather than with this profile: it is a source build whose Free Pascal and Lazarus build dependencies came to 1.8 GB on a bare Debian 13 image, against a profile that is otherwise under 100 MB, and it is not offered on Kali. Nothing here needs a radio: every trainer generates its own audio, which is the point.
Install it¶
Read the plan first. It changes nothing and prints every package, build, file and system change, and every consent gate you will meet:
Then do it. The engine asks for your sudo password once, near the start,
and shows the same plan again before it asks you to confirm:
A member your machine cannot take is deferred by name and the rest installs (D-039); the plan lists each under Will NOT happen, with the reason and the command that fixes it. Installation explains how to read every part of the plan.
What you configure by hand afterward¶
cwdaemon needs a keying interface and a group you are not in. Serial keying needs dialout, parallel needs lp, and this profile adds neither because which one depends on hardware the catalog cannot see. USB-to-serial adapters vary widely in how fast they toggle a control line, and a slow one keys cleanly at 15 wpm and falls apart at 30 — that is the adapter, not the software. flwkey needs a Winkeyer on dialout too. Check the exam question pools against the current ones before trusting a score: the pools are revised on a rolling cycle and a packaged version can be asking questions that are no longer on the exam.
Your first ten minutes¶
- Read the plan:
hammunition install morse --dry-run.morse-classicinstalls without recommends on purpose, and the plan says why, so a PipeWire desktop keeps its audio routing. - Install:
hammunition install morse.cwwav,flwkeyandibpbuild from source; the rest are apt. - Start with a trainer: run
qrqfor high-speed callsign drilling oraldo, which teaches by four methods including Koch. Both make their own audio. - Hear it on the speakers before you key anything:
xcwcpis a GUI that sends and receives practice text through your sound card. - To study for the exam, run
hamexam(US) orcanadian-ham-exam. Check the question pool's year against the current pool before trusting a score. - If you will key a transmitter later, read the
dialoutnote under manual setup, then runhammunition hardware applyand log out and back in.
Take it off again¶
This removes what Hammunition itself installed and nothing else. It does not remove dependencies apt pulled in, group memberships or configuration files it wrote; the plan says so and the transaction log records them (D-004).