I am trying to get on the air so John and I tired a contact again and I could hear my call de VE7JBX and then the signal dropped away and not much was readable after that. I put my amp on and went to 300 watts and called CQ and 2 signals came back at once and noise. As bad as I am I didn’t know what to do so I didn’t do anything. John in Canada sent me a text and said I had a pile up on my call sign. My theory on all this, now that I am almost done with the course, is that I should have learned at 20 WPM and 20 Farnsworth or at least 15 Farnsworth from the beginning. I have been having issues with the A and the N, they sound different when you listen to them at speed, but when I slow down the Farnsworth I think I am just trying to figure out if I heard the dit or dah first or last. That will just slow me down! I now believe it is very important to start learning at a high speed and a high Farnsworth level. Maybe not 20 and 20 but a better one would be 20 and 15. You want to learn the sound and not what came first or what did you just hear, a dit or dah. It is a fine line though because you do need to know the make up of the letters so you can send it but you don’t want to be hearing the dit or dah, but the sound of the letter. Aloha and 73! Read Part 1 Read Part 2 Read Part 3 Read Part 4 Read Part 5 Read Part 6 Read Part 7 Read Part 8 Read Part 9 Read the entire blog here Ham Radio Hawaii Facebook Page
Keep it up, you're making progress. Your sending sounded crisper/ more uniformly spaced than last time - and hey, creating your first pileup is exciting, even if you didn't know how to reply! If you're like me, you may find it's not purely a question of speed in what you hear - the cadence, or "fist", really can make a difference. (More so I guess with people running straight keys than keyers). I know there are people at the same speed 10-12 wpm coming back at me, and some, I just find easy to copy and others I have a very hard time, even when signal strength seems about the same. I can only hope (and rationally guess) that with time and practice, one's ear gets better at deciphering the text regardless of these nuances and "accents". We'll have that QSO yet. I made my first CW contact into France this morning with someone I've tried to contact but nil heard, for months. 20m seems to be 'warming up' as spring approaches, and today he was a 479. One other thing I'd comment from my ongoing experience in learning CW - last weekend, I managed to have about a 90 min QSO with someone right about my own skill level. Despite some erratic QSB, this was an incredibly confidence building exercise, since I wasn't worried about making mistakes. We both needed quite a few repeats but in the end had a long rambling contact about lots of things. In the following few hours (and even into the next day after) I found the extra confidence from that made a big difference in my copy. I went out and made about 5 SKCC exchanges, and found that as I tuned past ongoing QSOs I could rapidly "synch in" and head copy. I believe that some of copy fluency comes from just confidence, and "letting go" to accept your immediate impression of what each character is as it goes by. If you start to get nervous, and second guess yourself, then suddenly you're not just wrong but about 4 characters behind and waiting for the next "BT", "," ".", or the like to try to catch the flow again.
I hope to hear you and work you on the air! Enjoy your new developing skill. There are many great QSOs ahead of you. WA6JJM Mike
Great job on your first pile up! Did you get the jitters? Sweaty palms? Lock-fist? Now have to push your learning to the next level. The ARRL DX CW contest is this weekend, so get on and get some real good practice. I hope to see you in my log. Anthony/AB9YC
