WPM & Farnsworth Timing Calculator
Enter a character speed and an effective (Farnsworth) speed to see the exact dit, dah, and spacing lengths in milliseconds.
Timing
Why learn at two speeds at once
A common mistake for beginners is to practice Morse very slowly — five words per minute with every dit and dah stretched out. That teaches you to count dots and dashes instead of recognizing a letter's rhythm as a single sound-shape, and it makes the jump to real, on-the-air speeds painful.
The Farnsworth method fixes this by keeping every character’s internal timing fast (commonly 15–20 WPM) while leaving generous pauses between characters and words. As your recognition improves, you shorten those pauses — raising the effective speed toward the character speed — without ever having to relearn a letter's shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Farnsworth timing?
A way of teaching Morse where each letter's dits and dahs are sent at a comfortably fast "character speed," but the gaps between characters and words are stretched out, so the overall (effective) speed is slower. This lets a beginner learn each letter's true rhythm from day one instead of a dragged-out, hard-to-recognize slow version of it.
How is the dit length calculated?
From the standard PARIS-based definition of words per minute: sending the word "PARIS " once takes exactly 50 dit-time units, so one dit's length in milliseconds is 1200 divided by the character speed in WPM.
Why can't the effective speed be higher than the character speed?
Farnsworth timing only stretches the gaps between characters and words — it never speeds up the dits and dahs themselves. So the effective speed, which includes those stretched gaps, can only be equal to or slower than the character speed, never faster.
What happens when character speed and effective speed are equal?
The calculator falls back to standard (non-Farnsworth) timing: every gap uses the same dit-length unit as the elements themselves, with no extra stretching.
Educational tool only. Code-practice software and oscillators vary slightly in how they implement Farnsworth spacing; use this as a reference, not an exact match for every app.