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We’re at the two-thirds/homestretch-ish point in the class. The speed creeps up 1 wpm for each the next few sessions, eventually hitting 13. Remember the overall goals are: having fun, making friends, and picking up a new skill for a lifetime. Absent from these goals is “beating yourself up because you didn’t hit flawless 13wpm on the nanosecond the 13wpm session started.” Learning CW takes time. The CW Academy classes have a very ambitious pace for learning a new skill. It’s rare that everyone lands on the same point. So, relax, relish how far you’ve come(*), and, please, proceed at your own pace. (*If you’d like some perspective, retry the self-assessment tool – scroll down about halfway: and see how far you’ve progressed.) … but not as much time as it’s going to clean my “office” when the Pandemic is over ...

For Session 8 sending in class: What are your three most valued (to you) household appliances and/or power tools? (e.g., KitchenAid mixer, coffee grinder, and cordless drill) This weekend are two additional possible contact events for QSOs: CQ Magazine World-Wide CW sprint on 160m – The exchange is simply a signal report of 5NN and your state. Based on my hour last night, there were a lot of potential CA and WA contacts. (I could hear a few AZ/UT, but they could not hear me, which is a summary of my experience on 160m.) Look from 1.81 – 1.90 MHz. ...

As we all have felt, it’s quite normal to feel self-induced pressure at not maintaining perfection and, God forbid, be tempted to drop out and do it another time. A better way of looking at it is “if you stick around, will you be further along in your CW journey (and knowledge of Scottish inventions)?” Obviously, the answer is yes (though I’m biased :). And, as a bonus, you get to hang out with a great group of fellow hams, have fun and improve your skills. (Consider how much you’ve progressed in a short time!) I’ve found the sweet spot is to shoot for about 80% of the homework, on average. Sometimes you’ll be rocking it, sometimes it’ll feel not, but overall, you’re making good progress and friends. ...

Sessions 4 and 5 repeat the prior sessions, but bump up the Farnsworth speed to 5 then 6. It doesn’t look like a lot until you’re trying to listen! As I mentioned, it’s very common to feel an adrenaline bump when it’s your turn to send. If you mess up, or are feeling flustered, take a deep breath, send eight dits, take another breath, and start the word again (unless it’s like the last letter that would be understandable from context). Add more spacing if you like. Just remember, you’re among friends and it’s all about having fun. ...

The basic class — which I really wish existed when I took CW Academy – serves as a bridge between beginner and intermediate. Its focus is on Instant Character Recognition (ICR), the ability to hear letters (initially) and words (later) as one unit without any additional steps. The bulk of the official syllabus — which you should glance through as it is the best of the four — uses the Morse Code Trainer web tool. How the 16 sessions work out ...

I will be teaching my adult children how to drive and found it helpful to cobble together a syllabus of activities. This will be in multiple phases, starting with … a parking lot. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Parking Lot: Goals: Use and feel of steering inputs, mirrors and other controls. Car gauges and lights. Learn how the car handles at different slow speeds. Parking. Basic turns and navigation around stationary objects. Locations: Sammamish Park and Ride ...

For our last, unstructured session, we’ll do some more sending and copying using these lists of fruits and vegetables, and animals. As with the exercise we did with the state abbreviations, send a word to the next person, they’ll send the word back, “R” if correct. (If they don’t copy, “?” to resend) They’ll send a word to the next person, and so on. Welcome, Session 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 I’ve created a brief tutorial on Morse Runner. On the most basic level, this program is used to practice simple exchanges (call sign + serial number). When it calls you, if you don’t get the full call sign, you can either do nothing and wait for it to resend, hit F7 (?) or try a partial and F5. The partial is useful in a “pileup,” that is, if several stations responded but you only got a partial on one, you’d send what you had and the other stations should ignore it. (In practice, and occasionally in the program, that doesn’t always happen.) The default time run-time in Morse Runner is 60 minutes, but I would not run it more than 10 or 15 minutes because it gets tedious. ...

This is the ad hoc, unscripted part of the course. Welcome, Session01,02,03,04,05,06,07,08,09,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 Bonus homework: If you can, listen to the K1USN SST on Sunday either on air or via Web SDR, see what you can pick off. If you want to try to make an on-air contact, that would be awesome, too. As a reminder, the exchange information is here. In class, let’s try a few exercises with state capitals: (Warmup) Send a two-letter abbreviation to the next person. If they copy, they’ll repeat it back, sender acknowledges with an “R”. Recipient then picks a two-letter abbreviation to send to the next person, and so on. If they don’t copy, send a question mark for al resend. We’ll see if we can do a few quick rounds. ...

For the bonus homework: Compose an amateur radio-related haiku, a three-line poem where the lines are 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. Some examples from a prior class are below. As you practice at home, think of where it would be appropriate to add additional spacing to compensate for the lack of context clues: No propagationUntil someone calls CQThen the bands open CWTAt 40 words per minuteIs too fast for me ...

For the bonus homework: The session includes abbreviations and pro signs. I’ve attached two PDF files. qcodes.pdf has a nice half-page of common abbreviations and some Q codes used in nets, fsd218.pdf, from ARRL has pro signs on the fourth page. Welcome, Session01,02,03,04,05,06,07,08,09,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what I actually mentioned during class. On my pre-class notes I had an exercise where send a Q-code or abbreviation of your choice, then a very short phrase summarizing what it means. The intent of this would be to think about how you’d communicate this concisely. Pick four of them. We’ll likely have repeats – that’s okay. ...