It sounds like you’re coming along just fine! I’ll bet you could make a cw contact right now based on your progress thus far. Look for someone calling CQ with a strong signal, a good fist and sending at the right speed and have at it.

By responding to a CQ instead of sending one, you can ensure that you don’t end up trying to copy a marginal signal and/or poor cw. You also get to make sure that you get the call sign correct before responding. Then once you get the name, you’ve got it made. Signal reports, weather, QTH, etc. aren’t as important. And if the other op ends up sending a bit too fast, you can always ask him to QRS.

I wish I had my HF station set up here. We could set up a sched on 40 or 15.

Another update, three months into this adventure.

I was able to hit one of my goals the other day at 12WPM with five letter "words". (I swear that thing is going faster than 12... )



Oddly enough, what I have found helps, is setting the speed higher than you want to go and then backing off. So, I've been working/failing miserably at 15, but when I back it down to 12, it seems a lot slower. Once I can do 12 fairly well, I'll bump it up to 18-20 to get good at 15.. I don't know...it works for me.

While agonizingly slow for a guy who likes to have things right now, I think I'm doing pretty well. Whenever I get discouraged, I just have to remind myself that this really isn't different from learning a whole new language, and I wouldn't expect that I'd be fluent in Russian in this amount of time.

The journey continues...

Good progress! After having successfully achieved your target level with random groups, I found that transitioning to on-air qso's where you can often anticipate what is coming next in an exchange allows you to copy at a greater speed as well.

Another thing you might try is setting the text speed at 12 wpm but bump the character speed up 4-5 wpm. That really helped me.

You're making me think about cobbling a wire antenna together and getting back on the low bands!

Yeah, this LCWO website has the option of words and phrases (and some other things). I do find that it's a lot easier to do those than completely random characters thrown at you. Except when you're expecting a certain word and it turns out to be something else. It's a good way to get about four characters behind in a big hurry.

Pretty soon here I'll get on the air with it. The class that I'm taking has us break into groups and practice sending/copying to each other, so that takes away some of the nervousness of doing it for real.

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