[CW] "THE SECRETS OF CW" by Frank Merritt, VE7FPM

[Donald Chester]

N7DC at ARRL.NET <mailto:N7DC at ARRL.NET>  wrote:

 

> The military used tapes, or records if you are an old guy… 

 

That’s how I mastered the code for my first amateur exam.  The science teacher let me borrow an old Signal Corps code training course on a set of 78 RPM records, that I found stashed away in the bowels of the storage room in the physics lab, over the summer between grades 11 and 12. By mid-June I was ready for the Novice test.  The gentleman who gave me the test stealthily speeded up his sending without informing me, until after the test when he told me I had copied perfectly up to almost 13 wpm.  Three months later, after operating on 80m with only one 3714 kHz crystal to my name, I upgraded to General.

 

Since I had no-one to teach me the code, I was on my own, and don’t know how I would have ever learnt to copy code if I hadn’t  stumbled across those records. I had already discovered the hard way, the futility of trying to teach myself using a straight key, audio oscillator, and chart with the code alphabet in dots and dashes.

 

Those records, which the school had received in a pile of WWII military surplus donated to the science department from the government, were likely never used again and no doubt thrown in the trash later on when someone decided to tidy up the storage room.

 

Don k4kyv

 



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