A Daily CW QSO: My 2019 challenge

A Daily CW QSO: My 2019 challenge

Grae  

I want to get more comfortable with CW QSOs. I can do a 599 contest or special event QSO without thinking but I bumble around, feel the nerves and basically suck at sending nice clean Morse in a more conversational QSO.

I need more learning and more practice and it feels like that learning needs to be social.

So I’m setting myself a goal.. I want to make at least one real CW QSO per day in 2019. The more rag-chewy the better. So here are my rules:

  1. Speed doesn’t matter. Good sending does matter.
  2. Focus on the art of a good conversation, warmth and connection.
  3. If I miss a day then make it up in the following couple of days. This allows for days away from radios completely etc.
  4. Contests like CQWW or CWOps CWTs count as one QSO the only.
  5. The point is to enquire and learn about myself and improve my CW. No slavish adherence to rules is needed.

Other CW learning

I also need to do sending practice. I’m still thinking too hard about straight key and paddle sending. And I’m still enjoy doing an ARRL Morse practice mp3 file at 25 or 30wpm every couple of days for receiving practice.

Pi + Mumble + iCW

Grae  

I commute to and from London 4 days a week.  There’s an hour on the train each way.  I can only do so much CW training. What I need is something that connects to the phone to allow an easy CW QSO or two.  iCW is close, but doing that with a computer and all the gubbins is a bit too much to set up.  So I was thinking about this:

What sort of small black box can I make that will wifi to my phone hotspot, have a plug for key and headphones and micro USB for power (or have battery brick inside.)  It’d have just one big knob for channel selection and a couple of LEDs to indicate connection status.  

What would that be?  First thought is a Raspberry Pi Zero W with the headless Mumble client by Daniel Chote: https://github.com/dchote/talkiepi and a bit of work to interface a key and add a hacky headphone output.

So, that’s the basic idea.  I’ll see where experiments take me.   

Attachment to words and letters

Grae  

This is my next update on my morse learning experience.  I had a bit of a break over Christmas while away from my commute morse code learning.  Coming back, I’m please to have not gone backwards over the break.

So while doing the walking part of my commute I’m listening to 20/25wpm morse of random english words at minimum possible volume without headphones, so the rest of the world’s noise is in there too.  My experience is something like this:

  • At 20/25wpm, I tend to ‘get’ a word or two then miss the next one — this seem to be because I grab that word and interrupt the stream of recognition while I think about the word
  • Increasingly frequently, I can ‘get’ several words in a row.  This has some detachment/stepping back about it — my certainty about individual words is slightly lessened, more the experience of the words appearing in my head.   More like ‘knowing’ than ‘thinking’. Feels good.
  • I can feel the building of a decision tree for english words in morse forming in my head somewhere. How a word starts off as something then flips to something else.

Not sure these reflections are useful for anybody else.  They seem to help me.  The focus going forward with this type of practice is to listen more lightly, allow the words to form themselves without forcing them and then rejoicing/checking.  A kind of gentle, platful enquiry.

Otherwise, have acquired a PC so I can get Morse Runner going. I’ve set that at 15wpm. It was initially bewildering, but now starting to get a few points from simulated contest QSOs. I think it is useful for callsign recognition and getting the feel for on-air contest contacts.

More progress, more understanding I guess.   Slow, enjoyable 

Responding to 2016

Grae  

I’ve been thinking out how to respond to this basket of ills called 2016. I guess I can accept that people (celebrities, actors) will die. The hard bit to accept is the rise of #brexit and Trump and what appears to be this shift to the right, towards nationalism, populism and fascism. I’m pretty dismayed about all of this — starting really from the election of John Howard’s conservative government in Australia in 1996. My view was that the future was supposed to be kind, compassionate and generous and that all of us working together over time would help lift all humans out of poverty and degradation.

So, I’m disappointed for the future that I felt was my right in some way.

But how to respond to this? What to do? It feels like the old tools of protest, strike and ideological war just aren’t going to work any more. Nor are the tooling of well-argued arguments, experts or facts.

I’m thinking I’m going to need to do a few things myself, locally, amongst my own community. Maybe you might join in among your community?

Engage more broadly – It is easy enough to live in my metro-elite liberal bubble, but I’m not hearing anything from a lot of fellow citizens that are very angry, possibly struggling to survive and thrive. So, I’m going to open more conversations with people who are not like me, who I’d normally not speak to. And listen. Listen. Not try and argue what I think is right. I want to understand a bit more broadly how it is for people. Different people. I’ll have to be a bit fearless to do this. Small steps first.

Improve the local environment – My local authority in the UK is struggling to make ends meet. I want to help out and improve my local community by turning the ‘pick up a bit of litter’ into a proper habit – to tidy up near where I live and where I commute on foot to and from work. I’ve usually got a plastic shopping bag somewhere in my backpack. I’m going to put it to good use when there is a lot of trash around.

Look for good news and share it – On social media, I’m going to be looking for and sharing positive stories rather than the negative and shocking ones. For amongst all this shift to the right, there are so many wonderful people doing wonderful things. And sharing these stories with each other keeps some hope alive. And watching every frame of the #brexit or Trump train-wreck really doesn’t help my mind.

So, this is my small something, my tiny response to 2016. I hope this helps me and I hope it helps you.

Happy 2017. May it bring many positive surprises for you.

Originally published in a facebook post.

That head copy feeling

Grae  

Some more steps forward in the CW learning in the last week:

And I did have a tears of joy moment when I realised that I just understood a couple of words without trying at all.  Wow.

And this makes all the difference.  Learning now seems easier.  I still can’t head-copy continuous words or transmissions though, still need to stop between words for long enough to make it hard to get the next word.   The struggle to learn seems to have reduced a lot.  It seems now that just listening to lots of CW will do it. 

I listened to a fair few CW QSOs last weekend and my pickup of what is going on has improved radically, and the learning of the structure of CW contacts with it.

I’ve upped the speed a bit. During my commute I’m listening to English words, callsigns, my CW QSO words list and also just numbers with 20/25wpm Farnsworth.  The gaps between words aren’t big enough for me yet.  Still, that feels like the right way to do it.

And breathing, clearing the mind and relaxation makes it so much easier.

What if feels like

I want to record how CW now feels different in my head and body before I forget.  I can now start to feel the beginnings of my own autonomic or involuntary recognition of bits of words.  First shift was that while concentrating on the first few letters of a word, I would start to find myself getting the ends of words when my focus was on the start.   So that was the beginning of the involuntary recognition — common suffixes seem to emerge sometimes.

This is all only sometimes.  Sometimes it is a bunch of noise and I need an anchoring letter to get started.  Like C or W, which seem to be that for me. Haha. 

And I’m now increasing careless – in not trying to remember everything and kind-of assembling words from part memory, part guess and often enough getting it right.

Basically, it feels very different.  CW head copy has shifted from a ‘maybe never’ to a ‘when’ in my approach.

My approach

I’m mostly listening on the walking part of my commute, without headphones, keeping the volume level as low as possible, so allowing the ambient traffic etc noise around me to play a part.  I guess I’m thinking I want to learn to copy with background (band) noise as well (read that somewhere). Something about a generally low audio level seems to makes copying easier.  Not sure why that is.  I guess I’m regularly doing 20-30 mins listening per week day spread over morning and evening.   For months I was doing a lot less, maybe 10 mins every second day. The increase is basically about it becoming more possible and fun.  Note I’m just listening, not writing stuff down at all except when in front of the radio at home.

Sending

I’ve hardly done any sending practice at all since my ZL2 days (> 30 years) so have started that, with a paddle, using my right hand rather than my left that I write with.  Much more to do there. It is easy to follow in the flow of some sending but when I first start I’m not sure which way to squeeze for dits and dahs.  More practice needed.  

Still need to make the first on air QSO after 30 years.   I’ve fully run out of excuses 🙂  Might have a go at the CQ WW CW on Sunday, but very slowly.

Tools and tips

I mostly practice with Morse Trainer/CW Trainer on my android phone.

I keep re-reading Zen and the Art of Radiotelegraphy which is a revelation and a masterpiece.

CW: Getting inside the symbols

Grae  

In the last post I talked a bit about learning sequences of numbers.  I got up to 3 numbers fairly reliably, then I went back to the weaker letters and numbers and tried that.   I’m still doing this during my commute, and mostly in the walking parts, so I’m not writing anything down and I’m doing one group at a time.

I noticed two things:

  1. I can feel my tendency to (unnecessarily) delay recognising a letter or number until a bit late.   Like I need to hear the whole thing and then think what it is.   That means the next letter is already happening and I’m still thinking about the last one.  Or even delay until the end of the word.
  2. There’s a joyful ‘yay’ in my mind when I recognise something. This then distracts me and makes me lose the next symbol.

From this I’m thinking that I need to fully climb into each symbol and try and recognise them before they are finished.  More like feeling the letter or number and then quietly moving on rather than delaying and getting caught up with it.

As a result of this, I’ve gone on to working with enough symbols at a time that I can’t stop and think, or delay to the end,  so I’m trying individual groups of 5 and concentrating on properly climbing into each symbol and not getting stuck in them, in the congratulations about recognising something, or delaying it all until there’s a gap.  Some of this is mindfulness (being still enough, back to the Zen and the art of Telegraphy focus on getting into a mindful state) and some is trust and perseverance.   

So, I’m going to keep working with 5 symbol groups for a while, still at 18 wpm, and see how good I can get.All in all, I’m loving the learning at the moment. Long may that continue.

Notes on CW learning

Grae  

I do most of my CW training while working to and from work on my morning  commute.  So, I’m not writing stuff down at all, just listening to the Morse Trainer app on my phone.    Here are a few reflective notes on what I’m up to and what I’m learning about myself while doing CW training like this.

As I wrote here I’ve been training with a list of common QSO words.  Seem to have them pretty much down at 18 wpm.   18 wpm seems to be the max that the Morse Trainer app can handle, so I fix it there with no extra symbol spacing.   I can imagine there is going to be a bit of trouble getting me beyond 18 wpm.. But that would be a great problem to have 🙂

So, after the random QSO words list, I’ve gone back to training random letter and number groups, starting at 2 symbols together and planning on going up to 3, 4 and then 5.   So I’ve started with ‘AB’ or ‘C5’ or whatever the randomiser throws up.  This is going ok, except I can feel slowness/weakness with some numbers (2,3, 7 and 8) and letters like G, W, F, Q, Y.

This morning, I thought I’d have a go at the numbers. Started with random 2 digit numbers at 18wpm. I feel pretty ok with them, especially after a little practice.  Feels like about 90% correct on those so have stepped up to 3 digits now, intending to go up to 4 and 5 digit numbers and keep on those until basically perfect.   And after that I need to go back to the harder letters, or maybe even all-letter or letter-number groups up to 5 long at 18 wpm.

It feels like the key thing in here is noticing when my recognition is weak, so that takes awareness and that gentle kindness and experimentation to see what I can do.    I’m looking forward to real CW QSOs and want to be able to QSO before around the end of September.

My CW QSO training word list

Grae  

I’ve been using Morse Trainer for Ham Radio on Android to speed up and re-learn morse up to decent QSO speed.  I really like this app, it has most of what I need.

One of the modes is own text mode where you can add plain text (which will be sent as CW as is) or comma-separated list mode.  In comma-separated-list mode, the words are randomly played back.  I’ve been using this with a set of words commonly used in QSOs.

QRL,QRM,QRN,QRQ,QRS,QRZ,QTH,QSB,QSY,qrp,R,TU,rtu,thx,name,rst,cq,agn,ant,dx,es,fb,gm,ga,ge,hi,hr,hw,nr,om,pse,pwr,wx,73,=,+,SK,(,BK,sota,/m,/p,op,88,44,cpy,gl,cu,tks,ref,cfm,5nn,55n,599,DR

On Europe

Grae  

Political

  • Much easier to influence our neighbours from inside their club. Much harder from outside.
  • Leaving gives a green light to facists / ultra-nationalists to start campaigning against all foreigners and immigration — and we know where that can lead
  • We leave certain treaties that give workers rights; stop doctors working ridiculous and unsafe hours; generally what I would call civilised laws
  • Scotland will almost certainly vote to leave the UK if there is a vote to leave the EU.

Economic

  • Stepping away from a bunch of existing trade deals will cause an economic shock which will cost jobs and cause business failures.  This actually looks pretty certain.
  • View from outside countries/economies may cause pound to fall / currency uncertainty

Why Brexit is a bad idea:

  1. It won’t solve the immigration question. Govt and economy still needs migrants to grow and for health etc to function, and still need to face what to do.  There are really no shortage of levers to control immigration now; there is just a fundamental conflict between economic prosperity and lowering immigration.
  2. It will lead to currency uncertainty
  3. It will lead to new and difficult trade negotiations
  4. It will destabalise the current government
  5. It will lead to Scotland departing the Union.

Living with an electric Car

Grae  

I promised a follow up on living with an electric car. Here’s how we are getting on.

It has been a mixed bag, mostly positive with a few annoyances.   Here are a few highlights:

Quiet

There’s a quiet effortlessness about an electric car.  It is a different feeling to drive completely.   I was used to a roar of engine noise meaning power.  There’s none of that at all.  A bit more like putting the foot down and it takes off with a hint of an electric whirr.    Or touch the accelerator and it glides along silently.  Mind you, some of this silence will be just because it is a new well-insulated car.

Not smelly

When operating this car doesn’t smell. I also never hang around fuelling stations. Now I notice exhaust and petrol fumes on other cars.  This is a bit like it was when people stopped smoking in public and suddenly noticing smelly second-hand cigarette smoke when walking behind a smoker on the street.  So now I notice car pollution. Before I just didn’t notice.

Reliable

The whole car seems pretty simple and reliable. There’s a lot less to go wrong.  No emissions system. No real gearbox.  No catalytic converter, radiator, exhaust pipe, water pump, ignition, fuel injection, turbocharger.  Less to go wrong.  Instead you have an electric motor, a simple gearbox and a bunch of batteries.  Nothing has gone wrong so far.

Low cost per mile

So we charge overnight at home, so we’re paying off of our regular power bill to charge the car (with Ecotricity offering a small grant/discount for electric car owners).  Out and about charging is either free or pretty low cost so far.  So, the cost of fuel seems pretty close to zero. The previous £70 in fuelling the old petrol car has now pretty much disappeared.  This is a decent saving.

Range difficulties

The electric has a much smaller range than the old petrol car.  And the faster I go, the shorter the range, so motorway range (when range really counts) is a lot less than old slow road range.  This doesn’t matter at all going in and out of town, a 5 mile round trip.  But motoring across England it does matter.  It means both limiting maximum speed to say 60 or 65 and stopping regularly (say every 50 miles) for a ½ hour of charging.  It is something like this: the Motorway range is 50 miles and the slow road range is 70 miles.  Slow going.

I really want something like a Tesla with a 200+ mile range. That’d make it barely noticeable.

Home Charging

Home charging is easy for us, we have off-street parking and a garage with power. Simply a matter of plugging in the lead in the garage, then drive the car up, park up in the driveway and plug it in.  This feels just like putting the phone on charge every night.  The car will fully charge overnight from a regular 13A socket, so that is simple.   I guess we charge it every 4-5 days in normal life.

Patchy Charging Infrastructure

So I don’t need petrol stations — but I do need fast chargers out and about and things for people to do while the car is charging.  So more likely you want chargers at shops and the gym and motorway services.

There are networks of charging points emerging — they are being installed across the UK.  Right now there are not enough chargers out there so it is possible to get caught where there is a charger offline.  And because the technology is new, chargers aren’t as reliable as you’d expect.  This means that a whole trip can be aborted when a key charger is not in place.  Or alternatively a trip can slow down because I have to queue up to have a go at the charger.

We’ve resorted to careful planning for the longer trips now — checking charges are available and having a backup in case something is not working.  This is a bit of a faff too, as the mapping of charging points is contains across multiple services and they are all slightly different.

Community

Clearly this is all for early adopters. And that means there’s a community aspect to this built out of the novelty of the whole thing and needing to exchange stories.   

Turning up at a  public charger means you’re likely to run into people charging or waiting to charge — and there’s a chance to have a chat about chargers, cars, range, cables.   This is quite an enjoyable part of the whole thing — as long as you’re not in a hurry.  Think back to the stories of the introduction of motoring.  A bit like that.

In summary

This is early adopter stuff.  If are an early adopter then consider it.  Otherwise wait a couple of years for extended range and simplified charging networks.  There is no doubt the electric experience is a good one when it is all lined up.

I think it is totally worth doing, though with a couple of caveats:

  • Without off street parking it is going to be really hard.  You’re going to have to use public chargers for most of your charging.
  • Make sure that the basic range suits your commuting/regular trips.
  • Beware of buying an electric car — I’d lease until range becomes less of an issue.   Battery technology is improving rapidly.