i know it's 30wpm+ is because i've been using G4FON software
to learn in the evenings

i wanted to brag a little too that i finally made a breakthrough on
morse code.

i had been trying to learn morse code by learning individual letters at
high speed. i would set the G4FON software to play the letter over and
over at 30wpm and try to learn it's "sound" .. that is, instead of
learning dashes and dots, i just tried to learn the overall sound the
letters made. this was good, it was working, just very slowly, and i
would forget the sound of the letter soon after i learned it, i just
could not keep it in my mind.

then i got the HF rig working and started listening to some real morse
code on the radio. it was similar because it's going pretty fast but i
couldn't understand a bit of it, it's just too fast, and i can't recall
the letters as i hear them. i started realizing all the time i was
spending trying to learn letters just wasn't bearing any fruit.

then my motivation changed ... i started thinking, you know, to hell
with it .... i'm going to skip all this crap i've been trying to learn
and just try to figure out what the hell is going on in these radio
conversations. instead of trying to figure out what every little
letter is i just want to get some idea what they are talking about. so
the way to do that, i discovered, was to take an entirely different
approach. sort of a "wheel of fortune" kind of approach where you just
learn enough letters to guess what the word is hahaha. so, what
letters do i need to know ? THE SAME LETTERS YOU NEED IN WHEEL OF
FORTUNE!!!

so i learned all the vowels first. then i started using G4FON's
"common words" setting at 30wpm, and WOW! even just knowing the vowels
you can make out an amazing amount of what's going on. and you learn a
few other letters while learning the vowels just by the nature of doing
it ... like "T" is at first easy to mess up with "E" because "E" is
just a single beep sound. whereas "T" is a longer beep sound. so you
learn 2 for the price of one because you have to be able to tell them
apart. and learning "O" is a big help too, the vowel, because it's 3
long beeps and gives your mind a moment to pause and get back on track
when it is recognized. do you know how many words have "T", "E", "A",
"I", and "O" in them ? a freaking lot, that's how many. you can
even make out some words just knowing those five letters.

so basically in about an hour i started comprehending some morse code
that i wasn't able to do for weeks before using my other methods. i
can even listen to the radio now and pick up a few words just because
of the vowels and the very few other letters i know, and you can kind
of see where the sentence is going just because you can pick up "a" and
"on" and "be" and some other short words pretty easilly.

just thought i'd post that, maybe it will help someone else who is
trying to learn it ...