Excellent post.
I learned more than ten years ago from a group of guys in the Black
Hills that slowing down to about 22-25 wpm when running gets more
answers than "showing off" and cranking the keyer up to 35+.
These guys can all do 50+ head copy but slow it down intentionally to
attract more contacts.
It works. For about 6 years in a row they were one of the top ten 1A
stations during field day.
Maybe if the big contest guns did the same we wouldn't have the visceral
anti-contest attitudes displayed, and get more people involved.
On 4/29/2014 9:09 PM, Fred Jensen wrote:
INT QRQ [also QRQ?]: "Shall I send faster?"
QRQ nn: "Send faster, nn WPM"
We hams nounify and verbify International Q-Signals all the time, and
QRQ in casual conversation means someone who sends and receives Morse
at rates generally higher than the normal proletariat on the CW bands
and in contests ... which tend to be higher than normal conversation,
not a whole lot to say and often it's predictable. :-)
The alleged Morse receiving record is held by Ted McElroy from
sometime in the first half of the 20th century ... around 75 WPM on
text taken from the newspaper. I do hear about those over 100 [units
not always specified], I really don't know how to interpret that.
I first met Joe, now N8EA, at Keesler AFB in Biloxi MS when we were
both very much younger, I was 22 and he might have still been in his
very late teens, or maybe 20. Joe could head copy 50+ WPM. I think
he still can. I'd say he could paddle it too except I could *not*
copy 50 WPM so how would I know when he did send?
QRQ [as a noun meaning "very fast CW"] is a personal thing. It
depends on your Morse experience, how old you are, and other factors.
Receiving QRQ limit for me is around 40 WPM, but I doubt I'd try and
engage D4C in a debate at 40 wpm however. My limit with a paddle has
declined to around 25, maybe 28 on a good day, it's been inversely
proportional to the number of accumulated birthdays. For a CW newbie,
20 WPM character speed and 12 WPM net speed could be QRQ ... a struggle.
My K3 has a QRQ mode [unused by me] that improves the keying and QSK
at very high speeds, most of which I think come from keyboards these
days. I hope we don't get back into the nonsense of Extra, Extra
Lite, and No Code Extras. You take the test on the day you take the
test. It is what it is right then. You pass, you get your license
and it's as good as mine from 1956 ... period. We're all in this
together.
In the Summits On The Air crowd, a number of formerly SSB/FM-only ops
are actively learning CW. I know there are others. Every legal mode
is OK, and we're pretty good at sharing our spectrum allocations.
Others on the planet could actually learn from us.
73,
Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
- www.cqp.org
--
R. Kevin Stover
AC0H
ARRL
FISTS #11993
SKCC #215
NAQCC #3441
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