Subj : Storage
To : Holger Granholm
From : Roy Witt
Date : Wed Jun 25 2014 01:26 pm
Greetings Holger!
RW>> Today, CW is a lost art, with less and less amateurs able to copy
RW>> it.
HG> I didn't know it before but now I do. I'm an art lover, I love Morse.
You are a dying breed. I learned morse to get a novice ticket c1970, then
had to give up AR for a few years for lack of money, only to have to go
through the testing again for another novice ticket, c1977. Got on the air
to practice morse in a real environment, meanwhile upgrading to
Technician. Worked morse for a while increasing my speed from 5wpm to
15wpm, enough to pass the General morse exam and eventually the Advanced.
I quit there because I had no interest in continuing with cw and the
Extra class wasn't enough to warrant further morse practice.
My interests lay more in building antennas than being on the cw portions
of the HF bands.
RW>> In fact, learning to copy past the 'wall' at 13wpm wasn't as easy as
RW>> it was to learn to recognize words instead of characters.
HG> There's no trick involved, it comes naturally when you use it.
That's what I meant. If you use it enough, you will learn to recognize
words and not have to listen for each character. This helps to improve
your copy speed greatly.
HG> You start with learning single letters,
Did that as a boy scout in the 50s. I knew morse code at the age of 13.
Teens aren't that interested in morse or radio as much as they are girls
at that age.
HG> then progress to recognise some common "words" like RST, QTH and
HG> name. After that phase you begin to "store" the operators name and
HG> qth in your head and continue from there to recognize several words
HG> at a time and finally you arrive at the stage where you copy first
HG> whole sentences and finally entire paragraphs.
I never got to whole sentences and thus no paragraphs either.
HG> I admit that I have lost at least the paragraph copying because of
HG> not having trained that in a long time but it will come back with
HG> training.
I suspect that my HF rig, Kenwood TS520 bought c1977, has blown some pwr
supply caps as it has blown the fuse when turning it on. Someday, I'll get
around to fixing that. The only other source of cw that I have is the
repeater IDers around here.
