Support

Support for Morse Buddy is provided directly by Sparky1 LLC. There is no ticket system and no bot — email reaches a person.

Common questions

How does the learning side work?

It uses the Koch method. You start with two characters at full speed and earn the next one, up to forty in all — the alphabet, the digits and four punctuation marks. Practice comes in rounds of twenty characters, and ninety percent moves you up a level. A new character is always demonstrated before it is tested. Listening and sending are separate ladders with their own levels, so progress at one does not promote the other. The entire listening course is free.

I have stalled at five or six characters.

That is the normal place to stall, and the method has an answer for it: slow down and keep the same characters. Changing the practice speed — 10, 15, 20 or 25 WPM — is free and is not part of the unlock, precisely so this move is always available. Do not drop a character to make a round easier; Koch works by keeping the set and lowering the pressure. The reference chart can also be opened mid-round, which is better than guessing.

My sending attempts are marked wrong even though the timing looks right.

For characters that mix dits and dahs, speed does not matter — the scorer reads your presses against each other, so keying slowly and evenly scores full marks. What is being judged is the ratio: a dah should be about three times a dit. For characters where every press is the same length, such as M, S and T, there is nothing to compare, so the displayed target decides instead: an average at or above twice the shown dit length reads as dahs, below it as dits. The label under the paddle says which rule is in force.

Can I practise without sound?

Yes. Listening practice can run against the light instead of the tone, so you read flashes rather than hear them. It is the same code, but the two do not feel alike and do not improve together, so they are scored separately and some badges ask for each.

The receiving phone is not picking up the flash.

Check the obvious three first: the two devices need a clear line of sight, the receiving device needs the flash inside its camera frame, and the sending device needs Torch mode selected rather than Tone. Beyond that, bright ambient light behind the sender is the usual culprit — move so the flash is against a darker background, or reduce the distance. The diagnostics panel on the receive screen shows the live signal, which is the fastest way to tell whether the device can see anything at all.

What do I need to run it?

An iPhone 8 or newer, or an iPad, running iOS 16.4 or later. Receiving needs two devices — one sending, one watching — though the receive screen has a built-in demo that replays a real recorded signal through the live decoder, so you can see it work on a single device before you find a second one.

Light mode, SOS and the strobe are missing on my iPad.

They need a camera torch, and most iPads do not have one. Every iPad Pro except the original 12.9-inch has a flash, and so do the 6th-generation and A17 Pro iPad mini — but the base iPad line, every iPad Air and the older minis do not. The app asks the camera whether it has a torch rather than guessing from the model, so it hides those three controls and explains why rather than offering something that cannot work. The "Retina Flash" on models without one is the screen going white inside the Camera app; it is not a torch, it cannot be held on, and no app can reach it. Tone, the 18.5 kHz silent carrier, receiving a flash with the camera, and the whole of Learn work on every supported device.

How far does the torch mode reach?

Decoded at 125 feet outdoors at night with zoom, 35 feet outdoors without it, and about 30 feet indoors in daylight. Zoom matters more than you would expect: at long range the flash is smaller than a single camera pixel, and the app crops the sensor to keep it rather than letting the downscale average it away. The receiver zooms automatically — it starts wide, zooms in while it sees nothing, and holds the moment the flash appears. But distance is not usually what breaks it: what is behind the sending phone matters more. A bright window behind the sender defeated a 20 ft test that passed as soon as it was re-aimed away.

Silent mode does not seem to reach.

About six metres (19 feet) in a quiet room, and as little as seven feet outdoors with traffic audible from a road two hundred feet away. Phone and tablet speakers put out very little power at 18.5 kHz, and unlike light, an ultrasonic tone is absorbed by the air itself, so it fades faster than distance alone suggests. The figure drops further if anything is between the devices or if the sending device is face-down. If you need more range, use Torch or Tone mode.

Can other people tell I am using silent mode?

Yes, potentially. The carrier is not encrypted, so anyone running this app can decode it, and anyone with a spectrum analyser sees it — we confirmed that on real hardware with a Bosch iNVH meter, which showed it clearly. 18.5 kHz is above the hearing range of most adults, but many teenagers hear it, and dogs and cats hear it easily and may react to it. Silent mode offers discretion in a quiet room, not privacy, and it should never be relied on as if it were.

Decoding is producing wrong characters.

The receiver derives the sender’s speed from what it observes, so it needs a few characters before it settles. Send the preamble, give it a short run of steady sending, and hold the phone as still as you can — hand movement at distance costs more margin than speed does. Very fast sending in poor light is where errors appear first.

How do I stop the strobe?

It stops on its own after the duration limit, and the stop control is on screen throughout. It always ends with the torch off, so it cannot be left latched on. If the phone becomes warm during a long strobe run, that is expected — the torch at full power generates real heat, which is part of why the duration is capped.

Is my data collected?

No. Morse Buddy has no account, no server and no analytics. Everything happens on the device. See the privacy policy for the full statement.

When is it coming to the App Store?

There is no date. The app is in development and testing. We would rather say that than invent a timeline.

Reporting a bug

The more of this you can include, the faster it gets fixed: your device model and iOS version, which mode you were using, the approximate distance and lighting, what you expected, and what happened instead. If the receive screen's diagnostics panel was open, a screenshot of it is worth a great deal.

Accessibility

Some of what this app does is inherently sensory: seeing a flash, hearing a tone. Where that creates a barrier we want to know, because some of it can be worked around and some of it cannot, and we would rather be specific about which is which. Email us and describe what you need.