[Fists] How many hams use CW?

[Mike Zbrozek]

Hello Fists -


I have been watching the discussion regarding the Morse exam  that the FCC
will soon drop. Here is something I have discovered. Since April 05
I have been chasing counties for the CQ Magazine USA County Award.
There are 3077 counties in the USA and the county hunters have SSB  and
CW nets that have mobiles driving around daily. You can sit on a net and hope some
people might drive thru a county that you need. Doing this means you have to sit
in the radio room hours upon hours. Also county hunters have a few  web  sites
helping you with upcoming travel plans and current spotted mobiles. Anyway, while
I getting down to the last 50 needed counties I started to use internet for looking up
ops needed in certain rare counties. Here is what I have found: many ops have old
e-mail adrs resulting in a kickback, in some counties half the ops are teks, and the
messages that get thru are rarely answered. The few messages that are will tell you:
I am not active, not on cw, or I dont have a rig. In other words very few ops use cw.
And the ops that I had a sked with to confirm their county using cw was a difficult
qso. Terrible fist, xmtr chirping and drifting away. Ouch!!!!!
I was surprised at this result. I bet that this would apply to many ops across the country.
Too many ops are lazy and  dont care for cw. Since the FCC is unfortunately joining the rest of
the world in dropping the Morse requirement for exams what can we do? Look at all the old timers 
that never
use cw. Therefore the new people that will pass the written exams will be joining all those old 
timers that
never use CW. This is not a recipe for disaster. Its means to me that all those anti-cw people
will soon be joined by new ops plugging up their fone bands.....ironic isnt it?

Here is a good plan for the future. Any new op that seems to have an interest in CW give them a 
helping hand.
And plan on a fight to keep the cw bands from shrinking ....look at 80M cw? SSB extends all the way
down to 3.600 ...give a listen some night  from 3600-3700 and you wont hear many Extra Class
SSB qsoes going on. Prepare for battle.......man your stations:: grab ur paddle , handkey, or Bug.



73
Mike, K8XF
Fists 6773