[Elecraft] Improving your CW
Lawrence Makoski
[email protected]
Fri Jun 27 19:15:01 2003
Bud ... thanks for a great story!
73 de Larry W2LJ
[email protected]
http://www.qsl.net/w2lj
QRP ARCI #4488 NJQRP #47
FISTS #1469 QRP-L #778 FP #612 QRPp-I #759
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bud Rogers" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 6:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Improving your CW
> 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 <[email protected]> KD5SZ
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