[Elecraft] Farnsworth Method

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

This is a very interesting thread to me because it seems like us "dinosaurs"
really went through the same process you folks are experiencing, but we had
a different venue.

I doubt if I could copy *anything* but 5 WPM CW when I got my Novice ticket.
But I had a whole slice of 80 meters where almost everyone was sending at 5
WPM! 1952 was a l-o-n-g time ago and I won't pretend I remember it well, but
I suspect most of us had very little tolerance for sending at various
speeds. I do recall the challenge of working "that guy" who normally sent a
bit too fast for me, and finally having a nice QSO. 

Like you folks today, we could copy CW in our way, but had very little
flexibility in what we heard and how we heard it. That came only with lots
of practice.

We were lucky in that regard: we had the Novice bands where everyone was
practicing together and, when I got my Novice ticket, those bands were
*busy* with stations. We weren't working DX (most of us were running a
couple of watts on 80 meters and happy to work stations 100 miles away!). We
were just trying to have a good QSO and get ready for the 13 WPM General
license test before our Novice license expired (Back then the Novice was
granted for one year and could not be renewed: it was upgrade of go silent.)
I managed it during my summer school break that year, thanks to all those
guys on the Novice bands. 

We no longer have the huge number of new CW operators all concentrated into
a 50 kHz segment of the CW band trying to figure out what each other is
sending. FISTS and similar organizations do yeoman service helping new
operators build their speed, but it still takes practice, practice and more
practice. It was years before I could be working on a rig at the bench while
"reading the mail" on the CW bands in my head from a receiver going across
the room. 

It's a situation where the process of becoming proficient in CW has to be of
as much interest as actually operating CW. In that way CW is like learning
any second language. 

And you have some tools we didn't have. A few lucky guys back in the 50's
had access to an "Instructograph": a code sending machine with a wind-up
motor that passed perforated paper tape over a set of contacts that keyed a
code practice oscillator. My neighbor and I were able to use one briefly:
and quickly memorized the few tapes that came with the machine! Then his Ham
Dad took pity on us and put his brand new state-of-the-art tape recorder to
work recording some CW for us to practice on: all sent by hand on a straight
key, no doubt. In subsequent years I helped a number of newcomers get their
Novice tickets by holding code practice sessions in which I sent CW by hand
on a straight key to groups of students in the yard on pleasant summer
evenings.

I hope for you who are building CW proficiency it's as much fun in its own
way as it was for us. I'm sure that it's as satisfying once you have the
flexibility to jump into a CW QSO with 90% of the Hams out there. 

It's a never-ending process. I've related here before the story of visiting
KPH, a coastal radio station in California, and one of the operators jumped
up from his position to chat for a bit. I could hear CW bleating away from
his phones. After a bit he turned and sent "R" on the key and the bleating
continued. Then he excused himself to return to work. Then he sat down at
the mill (typewriter) and hammered out the rest of message he had been
copying in his head: not plain text but dates, addresses, phone numbers and
the like. He ripped that message blank out of the machine, put in another
and furiously pounded out the start of the next message until he "caught
up". 

I was amazed. I still am. Clearly he wasn't copying words, but characters,
and remembering them while carrying on a conversation with me. Such
operators typically wore their phones back off of their ears so they could
hear what was going on around them, and carry on conversations with others
as needed while copying CW. Like most commercial operators, the speed wasn't
all that fast -- usually something between 10 and 25 WPM -- but he could
copy virtually any fist, no matter how bad. In the maritime service with
shipboard operators of all proficiency levels, many of whom spoke English as
only their second, third or fourth language, the ability to copy the most
abysmal fists on the first try was an important skill.

I can't match that ability, any more than I can chew the rag at 70 WPM. Not
yet anyway. But what I can do on CW is a huge amount of fun for me. It has
been ever since I passed the 5 WPM Novice test years ago. 

Isn't that what Ham radio is all about?

Ron AC7AC