Last night I managed my first “proper” (i.e. not scheduled with a friend round the corner) CW QSO, I was messing around with the radio, called CQ and got ? back, called CQ again and got a response, from PA3FYE. I immediately went into a panic and pretty much forgot all of my Morse code but managed to get down the call and give a signal report, I also said “sry first cw qso” and mentioned that there was QSB. PA3FYE was very kind in putting up with my terrible code and we said our 73s and went our separate ways. It also turned out that a LICW member heard the exchange and then tried to call me afterward, but I think the QSB and me recovering from the previous QSO meant I missed it although I did copy some of his following QSO which was good practice.

This evening unfortunately after almost an hour of calling CQ I’ve heard nothing. I’m hoping that last night wasn’t just a fluke and I’ll be able to make further contacts and improve my CW on the air, after all that’s why I’m learning!

I’ve now been learning morse code since the end of June and more consistently since September, over Christmas I have let it slip a bit, but still continuing to practice. After a recent talk from Howard WB2UZE I joined the Long Island CW Club, previously I’d looked into this but the timings of the beginner classes didn’t seem to suit UK times, however now I have reasonable grasp of the characters there are far more classes at times which suit and the joining price is very reasonable.

A week in I’ve really enjoyed the meetings I’ve gone to and everyone is very friendly. In hindsight I could have joined at any point and sat in on other meetings/classes as I was going through the characters, there are a number of members who do that and it’s fine not to participate but just to listen.

I look forward to continuing more meetings and improving my morse code and would thoroughly recommend anyone learning morse code to join.

As my CW has improved I’ve started to schedule QSOs with a local friend, this has been great practice. At times despite being only a mile apart the signal has been very weak, but this has been great practice, in particular when we have had QRM, nothing beats on air experience, I can really see the improvements!

It’s now been a few months since I originally started learning CW and about a month and a half since my ‘restart’ after passing my intermediate exam.

This time round I decided to use G4FON after discovering that I could use it on my Mac via Wine. Part of the reason for this is that although the Chuck Adams course was good I felt that the code speed was a bit slow to start with so and I was finding myself counting, also there wasn’t really any way to work on particular characters as obviously being pre-generated files you just have to follow it through.

With G4FON you follow one of two orderings of characters up to the full 40 characters, ( a-z, 0-9 and ? , / . ), but you can choose character speed and spacing speed (actual and apparent speed) as well as choosing if the spacing speed is just for between words or each character. You can also select individual characters if you have specific characters you wish to work on.

By default the set of characters you are fed is for 5 mins, but like with everything else that can be adjusted. The aim (as per the Koch method) is to start with 2 characters, hit 90% accuracy and add another character, then hit 90% accuracy with that and so on.

The settings I started with were 25wpm character speed/15wpm spacing, but I quickly realised that this was just too fast and switched to 25/12, I made reasonable progress but was still finding it frustrating and very slow process. In the end I moved down to 25/9 and recently finally hit my 90% accuracy aim for a 5 min set of characters.

I am currently studying for my full exam so I am not practicing as much as I’d like, but I am trying to keep some practice up rather than letting it drop like before my intermediate. Hopefully before long I’ll be able to spend some more time working on Morse Code and improve my speed.