Well... maybe... sorta... I suppose... But, I take the use of QRZ to mean "who is calling me?" i.e. I may not have heard your callsign, would you please repeat... or if in a contest situation, just " who needs me? " in a manner of speaking. I copy the call fine, just don't know if it's ME that he's calling? So there's a fine difference in semantics. That's funny!
If you say "U CLN ME?" I will wonder if you need soap and water , " QRZ?", (Who is calling me?), is pereferred.
As above... I know who it is, I want to know if he's calling ME! I just realized my typo! But then, CLNG could be CLEANING too, couldn't it? OK, so I guess I should spell it out then: <his call> R U CALLING ME OM? DE WR2E K
True... it's just that some of us are newer than others. I think part of the issue with "new" CW ops such as myself is that we are learning the code as adults rather than kids and the old noggin is a bit less flexible at taking new code than the newly minted model. The closest thing I can think of as a Novice CW segment now is the 7050 - 7055 segment where SKCC folks hang around. That is generally slower code. My first 500 QSOs were mostly SKCC members and it was a big help. Richard, AA4OO http://hamradioqrp.com
Yes that's a good segment for slower code as well. I'm over a 1,000 CW QSOs now and my speed is up to 20wpm so I venture down to the 7030 area now and spend a good amount of time 30m. I was just trying to remind the long time ops that sometimes us "new to CW" folks may not have all the procedures down. I have worked some experienced operators who spell most things out but I think they are probably using keyboards because the spacing sounds too precise. Sometimes during QSOs I ask if I can switch to my bug just to see if they are using a decoder
I agree. I'm not sure about the noggin abilities, though. Adults have a lot on their minds, but kids are more easily distracted by almost anything ("oh look, there's a bug!") so maybe it's about equal. However, one thing I've found when "teaching" code over the decades is kids never heard of Morse code, so they also never heard it could be difficult to learn. Some adults also never heard of it, but almost everyone over 50 years old has, even if only seeing it used in old war movies and stuff. And over time the adults heard it's a hard thing to learn and do -- even when it's not. With a preconception of difficulty or danger, learning anything becomes more difficult. Probably the reason I can teach 3 year-olds to swim in literally one afternoon, but it might take weeks to teach an adult the same thing.
In defense of newbies (we all were once) there is much more contesting activity going on today then 20+ years ago when I last operated. With regard to answering a CQ with a call sign only, I think the newbies overhear the contest protocol and get confused with a more standard QSL protocol. And with regard to spelling everything out...they have not yet learned that brevity is the soul of wit.
Out of interest maybe to some, the RO's on merchant ships would often call up a station such as Portishead (GKA/GKB by simply sending 'gka gka gka, pausing and sending another three callsigns aka etc., until the radio stn they were calling answered simply by sending 'de',. and the then ship would quickly respond by carrying on with 'de ggbt .....etc (or whatever call sign). The Ship Shore frequencies were often crowded and busy. Any unnecessary transmission was just going to clog the airwaves full and waste airspace.
