[Elecraft] My New Mobile

[Jim Brown]

On Sun,7/31/2016 12:24 PM, Edward R Cole wrote:
> Jim,
>
> I'm long time* off CW so my receiving needs some work (practise) 
> before I try to do any significant CW (on any band).  *Long time means 
> 1958-59 when I was a Novice.

CWOPS holds free classes online at three skill levels. They work well, 
and there's a pretty long waiting list. Several of my friends have been 
through them.

>
> Certainly CW gets thru under marginal conditions. 

When W6JTI was in CM79, he was easy copy on CW, WAY above the noise. 
When we switched to SSB a few minutes later, he was VERY rough copy. The 
difference between CW and SSB is dramatic.

> KL7YK was active yesterday on 50.095. 

I think all of my KL7 QSOs (3-4) have been on CW.

> And 50.125 is clobbered by QRM but this where people monitor.  If I 
> were to call in the blind at 50.130 or 50.140 I could be totally 
> missed in a short opening. 

That was certainly true years ago, but with the increasingly widespread 
use of panadapters and other spectrum displays, Skimmers, and spotting 
clusters, you're going to get spotted almost no matter where you 
operate! There are dozens of skimmers around NA on 6M. There are lots of 
K3s and KX3s on 6M, many of them with P3s. Also SDRs and rigs with LP-Pan.

> A couple years ago during the CQ VHF Contest I did some work at 50.260 
> on digital modes but not a lot of 6m folks do that, it seems.  I will 
> be trying some meteor scatter and eme on 6m after my kW amp is running.

For years, digital mode skeds have been coordinated via chat rooms. 
ON4KST and Ping Jockey are the most popular that I know of. JT65 has 
firmly established operating frequencies on all the ham bands up to at 
least 2M. On 6M, it's USB with a dial frequency of 50.276 MHz, and 2 kHz 
higher for JT9.  WSJT-X, the most popular software application for JT65 
and JT9, can be set to automatically spot all decoded signals to 
PSKReporter, and many JT65 operators spot signals heard to a DX cluster.

If you load VE7CC's excellent CCluster application on your Windoze 
machine, it's easy to set it to display only 6M and 2M spots, and only 
those in parts of the world that you care about. dxmaps.com displays a 
map of the last hour or so of cluster spots on a map.  As I write this, 
there are spots from the western US to KL7HBK and WL7X, and much of the 
eastern US is working VP2ETE.

73, Jim K9YC