Tag: cw

Notes on Field Day 2023

2023-07-082023-07-30 wt8p

I wrapped up another field day with my friend Paul (W7PEZ) in Eastern Washington. For the two days, I had 204 contacts, broken out roughly as: Paul worked 200 contacts, nearly all CW. Both are personal records. Neither of us were “running,” which would certainly have bumped up the totals, nor did we operate all the time, because most of […]

Lion Rock viewpoint taken on 2021-06-25 while geocaching.

Using Slack for CW Academy

2021-07-142021-08-12 wt8p

During the latter part of my Basic class, when students were becoming more engaged, we ran into several problems with the email and text messaging. As an experiment, we used Slack in my intermediate class the most recent term. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In the spirit of trying to give back, I thought it would be helpful relating our experience. 73, […]

Morse Runner

2021-04-132021-04-17 wt8p

Morse Runner is one of a handful of tools (Morse Runner, RufzXP, CW Player, G4FON) that CW Academy uses in its curriculum, primarily with the Intermediate and Advanced classes (though I did try with my Basic), to help them acclimate to rapid head-copying calls they might hear during the event. Since they will be eventually trying to get onto CWops’ […]

N1MM+ and CWT

cw
radio

2021-03-122021-04-13 wt8p

There is also a walkthrough of N1MM+ here that I did for my intermediate class earlier this week. Some definitions CW – stands for continuous wave, a simple method of communication where a signal is either on or off. It uses Morse Code, consisting of dots, dashes, and spaces. A dot is a tone emitted for one time-unit, a dash […]

CWA Basic: Sessions 14 – 16

2021-02-26 wt8p

Sending in-class: Compose two “Dad Jokes” to send. For example: “Two guys stole a calendar. They got six months each.” (Or: “What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him and pitch to the rhino.”) We’ll practice more sending of longer passages. Revisit the Wikipedia front page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and pick a couple of items from Did you know… […]

CWA Basic: Sessions 11-13

2021-02-162021-08-23 wt8p

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 […]

CWA Basic: Sessions 8, 9 and 10

2021-02-112021-02-14 wt8p

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:1) CQ Magazine World-Wide CW sprint on 160m – The exchange is simply a signal report of 5NN and your state. Based on my hour […]

CWA Basic: Session 6 and 7

2021-02-022021-01-28 wt8p

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 […]