In the 1950's the U.S. 2nd class commercial Radiotelegraph license exam required 20 wpm sending and receiving. Receiving was 5 character random groups that included all punctuation and most of the special characters you see above the numbers on a keyboard. After 6 months of sea duty as an assistant radio officer, one could apply for a First Class license that required the same but at 25 wpm. I don't recall how long we had to copy, just the elation LS experienced at passing, Hi!
In our work we had to have excellent character-by-character copy, usually pounding keys on a mill. Contesting is a bit like that except that in a contest one has a planned format and very short message as contrasted so, say, copying press (news) for half an hour at a time. I'm not surprised at the speeds one hears in contests. When rag-chewing, however, I seldom find stations running more than 20 wpm, often much less. And I often just "read the mail" in my head listening to CW rag chews while puttering around the shack. IMHO, the different uses for CW lend themselves to different learning techniques. I have met good, competent contest operators completely unable to have a QSO that is not a contest exchange. They simply cannot think conversationally at a key or paddle. On a keyboard they often revert to a brag tape and must QRT when it runs out. And of course, everyone seems to go through a bit of a learning curve to copy CW in their head. After all these years 99% of my operating is still CW. I joke that I spent so much time learning CW that I am determined to get as much value from the effort. (It's not entirely a joke, Hi!) 73 Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- From: Elecraft [mailto:elecraft-boun...@mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of lstavenhagen Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2016 10:32 AM To: elecraft@mailman.qth.net Subject: Re: [Elecraft] OT: Decoding high speed CW Excellent points, IMO. I took both types of code tests. For my novice in 1973 when I was 10 years old, it was the random groups at 5WPM format. IIRC, I achieved the 1-min-solid-copy requirement by some miraculously slim margin. It was something like 2 or 3 characters and I remember being extremely relieved and elated at the accomplishment. For the Extra, years later, it was when the content was a regular old QSO, so I had virtually completely solid copy of the whole thing; the written test was nearly my downfall in that case (I passed with like 71% or something). Finally, IIRC, licenses like the commercial radiotelegraph license had even more comprehensive requirements - something like 5 minutes of random groups at 20wpm, 5 minutes of plain language at 25wpm, or something like that, depending on what class of license you were going for. Pretty tough! So yes it seems to be well established that plain language is quite distinct from random letter/number groups with respect to copy speed. And it was tested accordingly, or at least in my opinion it was. Fortunately, now that CW isn't required at all has seemed to, ironically, started a revival in CW. The CW portions of the bands do seem to still be more sparse than the SSB portions, but they're still there.... 73, LS W5QD ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
