[CW] Ham Code Speed vs. Commercial Code Speed

[David J. Ring, Jr.]

That's why commercial operators were trained to copy what they heard and NOT
what they thought they heard.

That in my opinion is ONE of the big barriers to doing good Morse code on
the ham bands.

There are people who tell people to "get the gist" of what is being sent.
Although this might be good for a while learning, it later goes the other
way.  The listener starts modifying the senders errors to fit the word he
"knows" it must be.  This undermines the listener's confidence, and thence
his ability to actually HEAR what is being sent.  It starts a DOWNWARD
spiral of guessing.

One EXCELLENT method of getting around this is to make a recording of what
you are listening to.

Instead of going, "Oh, Fudge!, I missed that word" - when you replay it (and
you might have to replay it several times to make sure!) you see that the
sender sent an error - or even worse, nonsense!

One other EXCELLENT way of improving sending is to CORRECT your sending -
this was ALWAYS done commercially, and it SHOULD be done by amateurs.

If I send:  "THE RIG HERE IH", I should send EIGHT DOTS (error signal) then
follow the proper procedure by SENDING the LAST correctly sent word.

Thus:  "8-dot-error-signal" HERE IS KENWOOD TS440S WITH 100 WATTS INTO LAZY
H ANTENNA.

This will help the sender - first because it is a PAIN to correct errors,
which forces the sender to send better code.

On receiving, when the listener starts HEARING the ERRORS at his "highest
speed", he is proficient at that speed.  When he can hear the typos from a
keyboard, or the missing or extra dots or dashes, he is close to mastery of
the code at that speed.

I believe this "guessing" at what is sent is counterproductive as it weakens
accurate recognition.

This is one of the BIG differences between commercial operators and hams.

If I copied:  VESSEL TO PROCEED ALONGSIDE GREEK FIS5ING VEHSEL - I would
write it down as such.  I wound ask the sender to confirm what I copied.  If
the station (and there were some that were) was so poor that he sent FIS5ING
VEHSEL in the repeat, it would go down in the telegram as he sent it.

The outstanding Radio Operators were the guys from the UK, Canada, USA,
Japan, Germany, and USSR (now Russia).  You could almost always count on a
terrible fist from a Pakistani, Philipino, and about half the Greeks!  The
Greeks were a very diverse bunch - while there were exceptions to the
Philipino quality (but I never heard a good Pakistani), the Greek operators
were either terrible, or perfect.  Egyptians, Chinese, were also quite good.
Such "backwaters" like Albania, St. Pierre Island (near Canada) had
operators that were imaginative in their sending.  One Dutchman - usually
fine operators also - had an annoying habit of adding one (just one!) extra
dit to every place there was a dit at the END.  The worst one for me to copy
was a East German fishing boat - whose operator sent with a hand key, and
each ending dash sounded like a slightly pregnant dot.  All other dashes
were correctly formed, just the ending dashes were severely truncated so
much so that I (and two other operators) copied her letters as if they had
ended with a dot - making absolute gibberish until we figured out the "code"
or "puzzle"!  I got her because she got frustrated by her unanswered calls
to another large nearby coastal radio station - evidentially they had
decided that their receivers were to be "deaf" to her routine calls.

Several senders - much like learning to copy a "cootie" key - just took a
bit of listening, and again - just like the cootie - they sounded "terrible"
at first, but after about 2 minutes or perhaps 3 all of a sudden you get the
syncopation of the sending and it is ENJOYABLE and a type of sending that
I'd rather copy than machine perfect code.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Maskill" <robertmaskill@dsl.pipex.com>
To: <cw@mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: [CW] Ham Code Speed vs. Commercial Code Speed


> Donald Chester wrote:
>
> >>
> >> The point is that ham radio QRQ doesn't automatically translate to the
> >> same
> >> speed of commercial traffic - and in many cases - it translates to
> >> about 1/2
> >> or 1/3 of the bragged speed of ham QSOs.
> >
> >
> > The same goes for voice.  You can carry on a conversation with another
> > person at normal conversational speed and comfortably understand
> > everything said.  Make a recording and try to transcribe every word of a
> > similar conversation.  You will be surprised at how many words are
> > actually unintelligible and the number of gaps that will show up in your
> > transcript.  We  depend on  context clues for much of our understanding
> > of language, and subconsciously fill in the gaps.
> >
> > The same goes for copying high speed cw in the head during casual
> > ragchew type QSO's over the air.
> >
> > Don K4KYV
>
> I have always found that a CW Operator can be good or bad irrespective
> of the speed they use.......
>
> CW is like any language we sometimes hear what we expect to hear not
> what is sent...
>
> --
>
> --
> Robert Maskill G4PYR
> Peterborough Cambridgeshire
> www.coastalradio.greater-peterborough.com
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