CW Academy - Lesson 5

The key to learning morse code is practice, practice, practice. Obviously copying is the focus for most people as it is very challenging. Any time I find a few minutes I throw the earbuds in and practice copying. I definitely exceed the suggested one hour practice time per day.
What I did not do very well for the first three lessons was practice sending. During the three days prior to Lesson 4 I started adding sending practice to the mix. Morse Trainer not only has the copy content in it but it also provides words for sending. You play the word and then you try to emulate it exactly as you key it. I thought I would show you what I use.

This setup is extremely easy to transport everywhere I go which allows me to practice just about anywhere. The paddles are a kit from American Morse Equipment and are called DCP (Dirt Cheap Paddles). The kit is $49 US shipped to your door (domestic). I built the kit at work one day over lunch and it is very simple to do. The keyer is a kit from HamGadgets and is called the Ultra PicoKeyer. Be sure to read up on this because it packs alot of features for what you pay for it including memories to store those repetitive transmissions for field day or contesting. It is $34.95 and shipping needs to be added. It was my first attempt at kit building and I found that I extremely enjoy soldering kits up and hoping they work at the end, Hi Hi. I recommend both of these products, not only for practice but for use anytime. Both companies provided me with excellent customer service as well.

So, this is what I looked like for much of our class Monday night. I felt comfortable going into class as I did not have much trouble with the lesson while studying in Morse Trainer since class 4 ended on Thursday but somewhere between 5 and 7:30 Monday my brain turned to mush. This lesson introduced  M,W, 3, 6, and our first punctuation mark, ?. At the beginning of class we started with me, one of the NC guys, and the instructor. We had one at a JOTA meeting, one absent for work, and the other Hoosier out for an unknown reason. We gained one after the Jota meeting. We started out with words and we did not have too much problem. We did have a faux pas here and there with a and n and the other struggled with d and w, but not too terrible. We then worked on call signs. I am still breaking the habit of expecting a call sign to be in a US format but I have made progress here. We moved along to copying phrases sent by the instructor. This is where I started to go downhill. I have not overcome my bad habit of dwelling on a letter that does not immediately register. I spend too much time thinking on that letter and BAM!, (No that is not an Emeril Lagasse Kick It Up A Notch BAM) I have missed the next three.

After this we were asked to send our call sign and a phrase and I was tasked to go first. Sending came a little easier but still not smooth or worthy of being on the air in my opinion. Our fellow students had to copy what we were sending. Once we completed that our instructor, Dennis, had one of us ask a question and the others had to copy. It, like most items, had to be repeated 2 to 3 times in hopes that the students copying had it complete. By this time the third student had shown up and we had to, in turn, answer the question by returning code. Two of us had some struggles during this back and forth and the third, who I believe is the most advanced in the class, seemed to do fairly well. Our time drawing to a close Dennis told us to brush up on call signs as next week we were going to work on the Morse Trainer lesson plan and we were going to do mock qso's so that we can start learning the format. Time to go study up on sending RST's and QTH's! See you closer to the end of the week.

73

CW Academy - Lesson 3

Thank you all for following this journey to what hopefully ends up with me being a no code ham. The views on the posts about this quest are amazingly high and I appreciate the following. If only it was a paying gig, hi hi.

I looked back over the posts about the first two lessons and realized I did not cover one thing. I told you where you could go practice the lessons but I did not tell you how to set Morse Trainer up. This is information I wanted once I signed up for the course. Within Morse Trainer you can set your tone, wpm (character speed), and wpm. This is also known as the Farnsworth method. It allows you to learn the characters at the quicker speed but slows the word spacing down to make it easier. Once you have the characters down you can increase the wpm. The goal is at a full 20 wpm. We are currently running 20 wpm character speed at a 10 wpm pace. Down the road we have been told we will increase the wpm to 20. So, you have the information that will allow you to go practice on your own.

Lesson 3 adds the letters R H D and L and the numbers 2 and 5. So one week in we are working with eleven of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and four of the ten numbers.After a pretty dismal performance last week I am happy to say I got some redemption last night.

It was a poor showing at first as there were only two students that showed up at 1930, me and one of the Tarheel guys. The other NC operator was absent due to some work travel. The other two students ended up showing up late, one of which was the N. Indiana no show from last week who was sick, and the other, our Canadian who was delayed by a Boy Scout meeting. I have been surprised at the number of amateurs that are involved with Boy Scouts.

The lesson started out with the instructor sending us words and we had to copy. The same format was used. Raise your hand when you have it and the last one pretty much gets called on. I did pretty well in this drill and we moved on to 3 word phrases. In the middle of this is when the other two students arrived on the call. There were one or two phrases that I struggled with during this time and of course I got the question, "How did you do Steve?" and I responded with a very confident, "As far as you know I did great!". That broke up the seriousness a little. About this time Dennis, the instructor, showed off the QSL card that he received that day from a CWop in Bahrain. One of the students paddled out the call sign and that led to a short stint of the instructor holding up DX QSL cards from his ragchews and contests and we would send the call sign.

Finally we moved on to our final task of the evening which involved us sending our call sign followed by a 3 word phrase. Sometimes the phrases make sense and sometimes they don't. When it was my turn I paddled out (one of these days I will try straight key and I will be able to say tapped or punched out) the following:

.-- ----. -... .-. ..  .-. . -..  -.. .. .-. -  .-. --- .- -..

You got it! W9BRI red dirt road

During this time I was happy that others commented on the mechanical noises during sending on one of the KX3's. I mentioned this in my last post and it also caused others in the room problems in copying his transmission. He is going to try something different next class to see if he can separate the paddles and the computer somewhat to pull the sound away from his speakers.

It still takes most of us 2 to 3 times to catch some of the phrases but we seem to be getting better. The important thing is that it is alot of fun and becoming a CWop will be a great accomplishment and an honor to follow in the footsteps of so many greats. I hope to get as good one day as W9ILF (Ivin) and KB9BVN (Brian), a couple of my elmers. Don't forget to check out their blogs listed over to the right and make sure to check out the Adventures with CW blog (W9ODX) as well.

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CW Academy - Lesson 2

Last night, Thursday September 14th, was lesson 2 of my Level 1 CW Academy class. Not sure what happened to our Northern Indiana student but he did not make it in last night. I put in the time since Monday on the Morse Trainer app and I was feeling good about how I would perform during lesson 2. That feeling was pretty short lived.

Everything started off bad when I arrived home only minutes prior to the start of class and I had to rush around getting things set up. When I fired up the computer to get Skype rolling Windows decided it needed to do some reconfiguration after an update which cost me a couple of precious minutes. That set me off right off that bat. The instructor thankfully called me a third time on Skype and I was able to participate. My frustration became apparent as soon as he started to send words and I started struggling right off the bat.

I have come to the realization that I have to be in a quiet environment to copy effectively right now. I hope that will change down the road but right now it is what it is. I started the class with the shack window open and even with headphones on I heard the kids playing outside and my dogs barking downstairs. My concentration blown I excused myself to shut the window so I could try to resurrect what was left of the session. I did do a little better going forward once I got some of the noise out of the way but I still had some issues.

One student is sending on a KX3 with the optional paddles. His computer microphone picks up every clack of his paddles and kills the rhythm for me. Another has a tone that it seems struggles to get out. I am not sure if I will do better in the upcoming classes by not being late to start with and lowering my frustration level but I sure hope so.

Anyway, some of you are stopping by because you are interested in taking the course and you are curious how it works. Notice I put all my personal stuff at the top so you would have to read through it to get to the part you wanted. I kid. I kid.

So, here it goes. Lesson 2 added letters and numbers to the original letters of T E A and N and, as an added bonus, we started numbers. The new letters were O I and S and the numbers 1 and 4. This session started out by the instructor sending us words and the four of us raising our hand when we had it. We moved on from that to copying three word phrases sent by the instructor and then he had each of us send a three word phrase and our fellow students had to copy. Beyond the problems I already stated that I had we all had some issues with copying due to improper spacing.

At the end of Lesson 1 we were told to practice sending our call signs. We were asked to send them tonight and our fellow students had to copy. This went fairly well except for some of the students who had not learned some of the letters that were in some of the calls. Again, sending suffered some due to our spacing. The instructor suggested we start practicing using the word Asian to work on our spacing because it is easy to run together and the word be unintelligible.

We returned to sending three word phrases and copying until time for the lesson to end. We will be back for Lesson 3 on Monday. Stay tuned!

73