[Elecraft] Farnsworth Method

[Robert Tellefsen]

Hi Ron
Looks like we are of the same vintage.
I was a 1952 Novice too.

I remember working every day on my code, sturggling up to 13 wpm.
The night before I took the bus into Seattle for the General test, I
had a buddy send me some code practice for a final tune up.

So, he launched into this string of stuff that made no sense to me
at all.  I had to ask him, what was he sending?  Turns out he was
sending the index to the tube tables in the back of the handbook! :-)
Really had me going 'til I understood what was coming at me.

Great days those were.
73, Bob N6WG

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron D'Eau Claire" <ron at cobi.biz>
To: <elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 6:58 AM
Subject: RE: [Elecraft] Farnsworth Method


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


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