[Elecraft] Iambic Keying (WAS: Straight key first?)

[Geoffrey Mackenzie-Kennedy]

Vic, I wonder if this is a special skill or an example of some normal human 
ability which has not been suffocated at an early age by some poor teaching 
process, at school for instance,

In the world of music some of our friends, and many others of course, can 
listen to a short work which they have not heard before (head copy into 
memory), and then play it back (fingers). As far as I know these friends of 
ours all took their first music lesson at a *very* early age before starting 
to go to school, and were not taught to read notes (the dits and dahs) 
during their first lessons. Instead they were introduced to some other 
fundamentals of music such as patterns and time, then notes.

73,
Geoff
GM4ESD



On June 30, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Vic K2VCO wrote:



> I've heard several stories like this. It's a special skill, which is 
> different from what
> most of us who learned the code as hams have developed. The text goes into 
> the brain,
> where it is buffered, and then out the fingers.
>
> In some cases the people who can do this may not be able to tell you the 
> content of what
> they copied. And they can do it with plain text, code groups, or a 
> language they don't
> understand.
>
> On 6/29/2011 9:57 PM, Phil Kane wrote:
>> On 6/29/2011 8:48 PM, WILLIS COOKE wrote:
>>
>>> For that matter, it would be pretty hard to head copy and then
>>> write a full minute with no errors to pass the FCC code test.
>>> Head copy is pretty much a ham radio thing.
>>
>>    Starting in the late 1960s I was one of the FCC code examiners in San
>>    Francisco.  One day  an "old timer" coast station operator came
>>    up for the Radiotelegraph First Class code test - 25 wpm -
>>    where a "mill" could be used.

<snip>