Ria,
If you really want to become a good CW operator, then I might suggest you
consider ragchewing. You really can't improve your CW skills in a contest,
especially if you're using keyboard and macros to do all the heavy lifting.
However if you're in the middle of a ragchew you have to be able to send
manually and then copy whatever comes your way. I think you would be amazed at
the number of contesters that aren't capable of holding up their end in a
ragchew. However the best CW operators have no problem with it at all.
73 Steve K0SR
-----Original Message-----
From: rjairam@gmail.com [mailto:rjairam@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 12:18 PM
To: sawyered@earthlink.net
Cc: 'CQ-Contest Reflector'
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] ARRL November SS is OK for the small station
My take - I am not a very good CW operator by any means.The long exchange at
high speed is frightening to me. I am afraid Iwill mess up and I can't
realistically run SS on CW. I think thisscares off a lot of people. I can do a
callsign copying contest likeARRL DX or CQWW just fine. I won't do as well as I
do on SSB contestsbut I can place top 10 or near to it. I gather for many who
aren'tbrought up in the CW tradition that they aren't really having a goodtime
struggling to copyHowever, the solution to this is not to shorten the
exchange.The solution is to get more people practicing copying SS
typeexchanges. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but I havebegun to
copy more of the ARRL code practice and others. This way myCW can get better
and I can then do serious effort SS.How do we do this on a large scale?Now we
have the ARRL saying that techs need to be enticed to upgradeby giving them
more PHONE privileges. Techs have full CW privileges(at 200 watts) on General
sub
-bands on 80, 40, 15 meters. Why aren'twe encouraging more techs to try CW?
The impression I get is that CWis treated as a hurdle, an obstacle, rather than
a new fun mode totry.73Ria, N2RJOn Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:10 AM, Ed Sawyer
wrote:> Interesting data about log submissions for SS.>>>> CW logs received -
2008 (bottom of cycle) - 1417>>>> CW logs received - 2017 (just released) -
1275>>>> SSB logs received - 2008 - 1870>>>> SSB logs received - 2016 (latest
available) - 1626>>>> Virtually every other major contest is growing -
significantly - over the> past 10 and 20 years. SS has been in decline steadily
on CW for a decade> (sunspots or not) and SSB was pretty steady until last
year's 200 log drop.> It will be interesting to see 2017.>>>> Likely, there are
an increasing number of SSB casuals just working some> activity that don't
submit a log and very few on the CW side (my opinion).>>>> The CW problem seems
terminal in my opinion for this contest only. No other> HF cont
est has such a poor trend that I can find.>>>> SSB can probably stay
interesting if enough casuals are willing to figure> out the exchange.>>>> I
don't see how changing the times does anything other than make some people>
frustrated - helping no one needing any help - and CW SS can hardly afford> for
any of the faithful to call it quits.>>>> 73>>>> Ed N1UR (no dog in this fight
- just getting some data out there)>>>>>>
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