[CW] High speed (correction)

[Donald Chester]

OOPS!  Hit the wrong key before the msg was finished.  Let's try again:

I have never made it a point to deliberately practise high speed cw.  Just 
work stations on the air as they come, and over the years I seem to have 
become most comfortable around 25 wpm, which is what I mostly hear over the 
air from hams who have a few years experience.  I can copy fairly well 
beyond that, and I find the bug more comfortable to use than my iambic 
paddle, which is collecting dust on the shelf at the moment.

I find COPYING at 30 wpm and higher difficult unless the sending is good and 
the signal is solid and QRM/QRN free.  At low speeds, you might miss a dit 
from a static crash.  But at high speeds, you might miss one or more 
letters.  I always copy in my head, rarely attempting to wirte anything 
down. Under extreme conditions when signals are near the noise floor I find 
it helps if both stations slow down to 10 wpm or lower.

I remember a story about someone taking the code test under the FCC inside 
one of those post office buildings with marble walls.  They had a tape 
recorder playing into a speaker, and no headphones.  One of the applicants 
complained to the examiner that there was so much echo in the room that he 
had a hard time copying, even though he could comfortably copy at the 
required speed at home.  The examiner replied unsympathetically, "Yeh, it's 
pretty rough.  Kinda like copying code over the radio."

Don K4KYV



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