The learning of Morse Code (CW) an interrupted series of steps.

When I was first licenced in July 1990 it was a ‘B’ call after taking the RAE in May of that year, VHF & up, no HF. Even before the ink was dry on my exam paper, I was studying for my 12wpm CW exam, the pathway to the much sought after ‘A’ call with its HF privileges. As well as being considered of having a proper call by some ‘dinosaurs’, even though I’d be a mere’G0’ rather than the more acceptable older series G2, G3 or even just sufferable G4. Strange that in my old club all the true RF engineers & other people who professionally worked with RF all seemed to be ‘B’ calls & they all consulted on RF matters an old boy who due to his age & infirmity rarely attended club meetings who was a mere SWL.

But back then the international requirement to access ‘DX’ privileges was a knowledge of CW. CW was still professionally used, bands were often shared & equipment, both professional & amateur still had a good potential to interfere with each other. So, then it was a reasonable expectation that amateurs had to have the knowledge to receive a message to quit interfering with primary communications or understand the rogue signal in amateur bands.

I’m sure the morse test then set, that it was not unintentional that it was sending & receiving blocks of five characters, the standard used both by civil & military users to transmit encoded information. Encoded it was, messages as mundane as a weather reports & bunker figures, secret military orders or a clandestine spy receiving instructions. Amateurs were a trained pool of potential recruits in time of national need.

I plugged away at learning CW, initially by learning the characters one by one, alphabet & numbers, only later adding punctuation (which becomes important later). I created my own flash cards, figures or numeral on one side with the morse character on the other. Flipping them over & sounding out the character in my mind.  Morse classes at my club were started at a painfully slow pace, counting the ‘dits & dahs’. Only once I was reliably writing down received text at about 12wpm was I permitted to start attempts at sending. It was back to a painfully slow pace sending, gradually building speed towards 12wpm.

Once I was reliably sending at 10wpm my tutor suggested I send off my application to sit a morse test knowing it would be a few months before I would sit the test. I received a list of dates & exam centres in March 91, the most convenient located session to me was not until the May so applied for that. I used my time waiting to further improve my speed & precision, I even bought a new key, all polished brass & a heavy marble base. I struggled with that key, it seemed to have a mechanical resonance that made it uncomfortable to use. I reverted to my military surplus WT8amp screwed to a wooden offcut. Then it was straight keys only, only experienced operators graduated to paddle keys or bugs.

It was with my cheap & cheerful surplus key that I took my test. On arrival we were all invited in to plug our keys, if we had brought one, (who would risk taking ‘the test’ on an unfamiliar key?) into the sounder to be used for the sending test & adjust it if required. We left our keys on the side & were all sent out. A short while later we were all called back in to sit the receive tests. Once we were all seated (spaced out, it was an exam) & comfortable (who is ever comfortable in an exam?) the examiner explained the test & a short passage was sent to ensure we all could hear clearly & were comfortable with the acoustics. I think headphones were available, but no one used them. The receive test was a breeze, which was a worry, was I overconfident. When I got my results later, I had no errors on either part, plain text & figures. We were again all sent out the room, to be called back in one by one to take our sending test.

When it was my turn, I was invited to plug in my key, make myself comfortable & again send a short passage to settle myself in & if necessary, adjust my key. I was given my plain text groups to send, calmed my nerves & sent the groups. I perceived no errors in my sending & nothing was said on completion. I then sent my groups of figures, on the last group I fudged a number, not missent or the wrong number, just not a clean character so I paused sent the ‘eight dits’ for an error & resent the number, then finished the group. The nerves were back in force, was it only one corrected error sent? I again was sent out the room after disconnecting my key. I’m sure it was a stage whisper, but as I was leaving the room I heard “I would have accepted that, but he sent the correction…”. Once the last student had completed his test, we all returned to collect our keys & be given the information on how we would get our results & what to do pass or fail. The examiners were not permitted to tell us the results of our tests, however I had an interesting conversation with one of them.

The tests were conducted by volunteers from the amateur community & mine was led by members of the Maidstone Club. Like any good club member this volunteer was looking out to recruit new members. Maidstone at that time had a good reputation for contesting & the opening gambit was “are you busy the first weekend in June, we could use someone with your ability?” The first weekend in June is the HF National Field Day Contest a CW only contest in Europe, so I took from the question that I hadn’t done badly on the test & so gained some confidence. Sadly, I had to disappoint my new friend as I already was committed to the contest with my own club, we parted with a handshake & a knowing nod from him.

The post was eagerly waited for days afterwards, fortunately it was good news, a pass. Yes, only that one corrected error on the figures sent. The post had arrived as I was leaving for work, so I grabbed the necessary paperwork & my cheque book. The application for my ‘A’ call was in the post before the end of the day. 

Pleasingly, June 1991 G7HTI was no more & a newly minted G0PDZ was now on the air. In fact, it was a mere thirty-two years before G7HTI was again heard on the air, as I recently regained the call on behalf of the Hilderstone Radio Society as a second club call for use by Hilderstone Trainees & Instructors. Rule changes removing the CW requirement in the intervening years had made G7 calls a Full Licence, equivalent to the G0.

CW was a major mode in my operating for the next few years, I even entered a few contests. But I never could achieve speeds much more than 14wpm as I still was counting ‘dits & dahs’, stumbling over punctuation & the prosigns which never were fully embedded in my brain. Then for various reasons my participation in the whole hobby came to a halt for many years. But even in these ‘gap years’ I would occasionally plug in a radio & listen to some CW or as computers rapidly advanced listen to some computer generated morse.

I haltingly returned to the hobby in 2011, but fully in 2014, always with an intention to relearn the skill, knowing now that there were better ways to learn Morse. I made various forays into restarting learning but became distracted by other interests.

In 2023 I decided I had procrastinated enough & when I saw a Facebook post by a UK amateur that he was a new coordinator for the CWOPS CW Academy I looked them up online. Sadly, his sessions clashed with my club nights, but I signed up anyway choosing other days. The set homework along with twice weekly online video classes & need to use a keyer with paddles would be just the discipline I needed to persist.

As part of the sign-up process there was an online assessment of what level of class was most suitable, beginner, fundamental, intermediate & advanced. I took the assessment & was assessed as capable for Intermediate, but I knew my weakness for punctuation & prosigns feeling that this may quickly become beyond me, I chose the fundamental class. Additionally, I needed the opportunity to build a foundation on using paddles. 

My initial CW operating had purely been with a straight key & using my dominant right hand. Even then on protracted operating sessions I found the straight key tiring to use especially at the top of my operating speed. In recent years I have suffered with severe shoulder pain & have undergone several surgeries. I now have minor nerve damage, some muscle weakness & occasional mobility issues in my right arm. Right-handed straight key use is no longer a serious proposition & I have had laughable results using my left hand when I’ve tried, but not persisted to improve. However, I found less problems trying a paddle left-handed (Others who have heard my attempts may state differently!). 

This time I am relearning receiving CW using a far higher character speed of 25wpm with longer gaps between them, this is called the ‘Farnsworth method’, you eventually reduce the gaps until you can receive at 25wpm proper. Sending is with a slower character rate set on the keyer, around 15wpm initially but increasing as confidence & competence is gained, again with longer spaces between characters. 

I was pleased to receive acceptance on a class set to start in September 2023. I then received an email stating that pre-classes would start in August. The first couple of sessions were focussed upon getting the various students audio & video set up on Zoom so that they could be seen, their voice heard & most importantly the tone generated by their keyer.

Zoom & the other video conferencing platforms have worked extremely hard, particularly since the pandemic, & the explosion of ‘working from home’, to enable users to effectively use the platform on multivarious devices in an infinite range of situations. So, the algorithms used to process the sound of the human voice to be filtered out from the background noises have been impressive in permitting people to participate in a conference call, such as whilst sitting on a park bench, next to a waterfall, with a brass band playing in the distance using a mobile phone in speaker phone mode propped up next to them. All this clever software engineering plays against us wanting both the human voice & a single intermittent tone generated by the keyer. It can be done but the work needed varies user by user for their specific situation, but basically headphones, an external microphone & using a computer greatly ease matters. Additionally computers will also throw in a curve ball as we use them for so many different purposes. I learnt a valuable lesson on session two of our pre-classes, as an unused program running in the background crashed mid class causing audio processing issues, I now try to remember to close all unneeded programs & restart the computer prior to a session to hopefully clear any hanging processes that may otherwise come to haunt me. But I couldn’t do anything to stop my laptop complaining about the heat as the UK suffered a heatwave over my last couple of classes.

It is amazing that over a few weeks of pre-classes, doing the homework, disciplining myself to do it over several sessions every day the progress that I’m making. The academy LCWO program, it identifies weaknesses & identifies progress I’m very impressed. In addition to the set homework, I’ve added other sessions to relearn those punctuation characters as a sound group rather than counting ‘dits & dahs’ then computing in my head what I’d heard, by which time I’ve missed the next two characters sent. Work in progress though!

Already I can see the ethos of the class is true in practice ‘fun, friendship & by the way learn a little Morse’. A by product is every session is like working DX on air, my tutors & classmates are from various parts of the USA, Europe & as far as India. Whilst our voices divide us due to accents & colloquialisms, the use of English as a first or second language it is clear that Morse Code unites us, the only difference is the tone chosen by each operator that suits their ear & when it comes to real operating on the air even that disappears as it’s the receiving operator that choses the tone they wish to receive at. CW a great leveller, an international language.

Before I close, I must make clear that there is no criticism real or unintended to those who helped me on my path to acquiring CW.  Those who helped me back then, I count as lifelong friends, to whom I am still very grateful. All limitations are mine. I did acquire Morse, passed the test & had several years of very enjoyable operating CW. The accepted wisdom & routine practice then was that Morse was learnt at slow speed with plenty of thinking time, gradually speeding up as knowledge was established & confidence grew. Many people found no issues with this method, did not have ‘speed humps’ to get past or quickly moved through them. I simply stopped advancing by not using the skill for many years. They couldn’t have done a bad job as the love of Morse has never been extinguished & I still have the desire to do better.

So first steps on this renewed journey & more reports to come…..