[Elecraft] Re: CW recognition

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

There may be value in going back to the way many of us learned in the middle
of the last century. Start at whatever speed allows you to hear the elements
- 1 or 2 WPM if needed - and  learn A, B, C, and so on, even if you have to
count dits and dahs. It's fun to group letters to make little words and
learn those letters - sort of a CW equivalent to "CAT" in first grade<G>.
(Actually a first grade reader would probably provide a lot of neat words to
learn on). 

All the high-tech methods aside, I taught many people CW in our Ham study
classes in the early 1950's sitting in my buddy's back yard on warm summer
evenings with a code practice oscillator and straight key going:
"Dahhhhhhhhhh - dit - Dahhhhhhhh - dit. Until they could write down "C" when
they heard it. After the alphabet came building speed, all the way up to the
stratospheric speed of 5 wpm for the Novice test. 

And  many of those hams went on to be great QRQ ops. All of them had fun.

The new "high tech" methods might be more efficient for many people, but the
old fashioned, learn the characters, then build speed, is a perfectly viable
alternative if it's gibberish with the other techniques. Shoot, the first CW
I ever copied, I wrote the dots and dashes down on paper. Fortunately I was
listening to commercial stations that kept repeating something over and
over. After much labor I figured out it was CQ CQ CQ DE KPH KPH KPH and then
a bunch of gibberish that turned out to be listening frequencies <G>. 

I may not be a world-class operator but from that humble beginning I got my
Novice and have used CW as my primary medium for more than 99% of my
operating for over half a century and enjoyed every second of it. I tell
people I'm a pure CW operator because, after all the effort I had to put
into learning it, this is the way I get the biggest return on my investment
<G>. 

One of the things I've noticed again and again is that I don't have any
problem switching between 30 wpm and 5 wpm, sending or receiving. Many ops
I've known who learned using the more current methods had to stop and
"learn" the code all over again because they couldn't handle the range of
speeds actually found on the Ham bands, especially the slower speeds. Some
seem to have never learned to copy below 12 WPM or so. 

Ron AC7AC