FW: [Elecraft] CW

[Vic Rosenthal]

Dan Barker wrote:

> Anytime you are practicing sending (or sending on the air for that matter),
> it can be extremely enlightening (or depressing, depending on your fist) to
> hook up a CW reader (I use CWGet) and look it over after your session. I
> find it very helpful with spacing. 

Poorly spaced CW is by far the hardest kind to copy.  Have you ever heard the 
'banana boat swing?"  This describes a form of bug sending in which the number 
of dits in a letter is more or less proportional to the speed!  No problem, I 
can copy it.  Or the 'Lake Erie swing', also a bug phenomenon, in which you can 
imagine the operator timing his code to the rolling of a ship: "daaaaah di 
daaaaah dit DAT dah didah" (yes, the 'DAT' is intentional).

Thanks to keyers, these phenomena are only rarely heard today, but what we do 
have is operators who run letters and words together.  For example, I have a 
friend whose call apparently begins with "YH" (he is in California, see if you 
can guess what he is trying to send).  Run-on word spacing is even worse, 
leaving my head spinning.

-- 
73,
Vic, K2VCO
Fresno CA
http://www.qsl.net/k2vco