Inc. All rights reserved. Prepared as a membership service by the American Radio Relay League, Inc., Technical Information Service. For your convenience, you may reproduce this information, electronically or on paper, and distribute it to anyone who needs it, provided that you reproduce it in its entirety and do so free of charge. Please note that you must reproduce the information as it appears in the original, including the League's copyright notice. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Farnsworth timing of Morse transmissions.
Farnsworth timing is defined as sending the characters at a faster speed than the words.
WPM, Morse is most easily read by ear when the characters are recognized rhythmically rather than by counting the dots and dashes. But the person just learning Morse starts at very slow speeds, where counting is easier than recognizing the slow rhythm of the characters. So in order to increase their ability to read Morse above a few words per minute, students are forced to shift from the counting mode to the rhythm recognition mode. The idea behind the Farnsworth method is to eliminate the counting phase by sending the characters at a speed at which rhythm recognition is easy and counting is not. This forces the student to learn the rhythms.