WPM Clarification

Question

On Sprint 2 Demo, Dr. Vincent told us that the length of the dot and dash should not change when we change the word per minute. Is it correct though? Checking the website Dr. Vincent showed us here: https://lcwo.net/wordtraining, we notice that when changing the WPM, the length of the dot and dash changed too. Furthermore, most the sources about calculating WPM we found on the internet we found also said that the length of one dot is calculated based on the WPM given.

https://www.reddit.com/r/morse/comments/r0lu7z/length_of_a_time_unit/
https://www.kent-engineers.com/codespeed.htm
https://k7mem.com/Keyer_Speed.html

Is anyone still working on this checkpoint? I just want to clarify whether I understand the WPM correctly.

Answer 1

From what I understood when Dr. Vincent was talking, even though the website changes the duration between dits and dahs based on WPM, it becomes very hard to understand when it is too slow. Thus, he recommended we keep the intraspacing (spacing within a single character, such as the dits and dahs) constant. This means changing the space between characters and words at a consistent ratio while keeping the spacing within the dits and dahs unchanged. I hope this makes sense.

Comments

Did he tell you much time should be set for a dits?

Answer 2

The WPM aspect can definitely be a complex concept to grasp especially since it seems that there is a lot of information online about this. What was suggested for us to keep it simple but understandable is to allow more space between entire character to be able to recognize when a character is done and not stretch out the time too much between the individual dit and dahs to the point where the user would be confused whether or not the silence is a space between character.