[Elecraft] QRP and contesting

[Dave New, N8SBE]

On 2022-11-10 21:21, Bill Lederer wrote:
> That is pretty impressive.
> 
> When I was first a ham, one of the locals was W7QYA, Flo, a school 
> teacher
> not far away. I had managed to crank my speed up to 40 (with some 
> struggle)
> but she said that was painfully slow for her. Her nominal speed was 65
> wpm.  I have yet to get much above 40.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 12:47 PM Wayne Burdick <n6kr at elecraft.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Funny story.... Last Field Day my son and a friend of his went camping
>> with our group. Neither of them are CW operators (yet), but they did 
>> know
>> the alphabet. They borrowed a MCU-controlled code-practice generator 
>> from
>> another op and were competing to see who could copy single letters at 
>> the
>> fastest rate.
>> 
>> When they got stuck at around 20 WPM, I said, "how fast does that 
>> thing
>> go?" It apparently would go much, much higher, into Morse nosebleed 
>> range.
>> 
>> Just for fun, I asked them to set it up to generate random English 
>> text at
>> 45 WPM. I decoded enough of it to convince them that this code speed 
>> was in
>> my head-copy range. Then they started bumping it up another 5 WPM at a
>> time--a challenge! I was in some sort of zone that day. Maybe it was 
>> the
>> sunshine; maybe the idyllic sound of blue jays; maybe the 4-pack of 
>> White
>> Claw I'd scored at the liquor store. In the end I managed to copy 
>> several
>> words at 70 WPM. I'll never know if they were inspired or demoralized. 
>> They
>> shook their heads and went off on a 5 mile hike.
>> 
>> Wayne
>> N6KR
>> 
>> 
Reminds me of an op I knew that could copy RTTY in his head.

73,

-- Dave, N8SBE