[Elecraft] Improving your CW

[Bud Rogers]

On Friday 27 June 2003 09:07, Robert Boerhorst wrote:

> local club (also ex Merchant Navy). On one of these occasions my
> father suddenly stood behind me and said: This person has a good
> fist. It appeared to me that my father after 33 years was still
> copying CW at 14 wpm in his head without writing anything down.

Robert, you remind me of a similar story.  Around 1980 I was fairly new 
to ham radio.   I was working in a Radio Shack store in Duncan, OK.  
The co-owners were my Elmers.  One slow day, one of the owners brought 
his Drake TR4CW to work.  It had an intermittent receive problem that 
he had been chasing for a while.  He took the covers off, set it up on 
the counter, stuck a short piece of wire in the antenna jack, and tune 
it to the CW portion of 20 meters.  He turned the volume up just enough 
so that he could hear it, and left the rig running on the counter.  By 
midafternoon 20 meters was open and several CW signals were faintly 
audible.  

An older gentleman who had been in the store for a while happened to 
walk by the counter.  As he walked by the radio, the faint sounds of CW 
caught his attention.  He stopped and looked around for the source of 
the sound.  In a bit his eyes focused on the Drake.  He said, "That 
sounds like Morse code."  My boss explained that it was an amateur 
transceiver.  That led to more questions and a lengthy conversation 
about amateur radio.  With three hams working in the store, this was 
not an uncommon occurrence.  During more than one such conversation, 
casual shoppers turned into customers and friends. Turned out he had 
been a CW operator in the Army Signal Corps in WWII.  

During a lull in the conversation a curious thing happened.  The man's 
eyes turned back to the radio on the counter.  As he listened to the 
faint sounds coming from the speaker, a transformation came over him.   
In a few seconds he started reading the CW aloud.   In a few minutes he 
was copying better than I could.  It was the most amazing thing I had 
ever seen.

The man became a regular in the store, and a friend.  In less than a 
month he passed his Novice exam on the counter in the store.  It 
troubles me that I can't remember his name or his call now.  Not long 
after that, I moved and lost contact.  But I still remember the look he 
got when he started copying that code.  You could see it in his eyes.  
It was as if he suddenly got radar lock.  He hadn't heard any code in 
nearly 40 years, but it came back to him in minutes.


-- 
Bud Rogers	<budr@sirinet.net>	KD5SZ