Jumpstarting my CW Journey
For a bit now, I’ve been wanting to get back into making contacts over Morse code. Voice has felt a bit dull, and I’m currently in a living situation that doesn’t allow me to put up antennas at all. So I’m trying to build out a setup that allows me to make contacts with low cost, low power, and still be fun and cool!
A few years back, I did the CWops Beginners course over a summer - and got pretty good for a first time! I could send fairly well, had all the letters down at ~15-20 WPM with some Farnsworth spacing, and completed the course by doing a very slow simple QSO with the class advisor (shoutout to Bruce K1BG for being an awesome CW mentor for youth ops!).
But, since then it’s probably been a year and a half since I seriously tried to make CW contacts outside of working a friend in a contest I wasn’t in, and where I knew their call and just had to send “5NN.” I’ve got an old QCX+ sitting on my desk that I’ve never aligned and gotten on the air, and so I decided to go back to the CW journey.
Every day for the past couple weeks, I’ve been doing at least 1 session of KE9BOS’s RFKeeper CW Training in QSO mode. This has been great for practicing callsigns and common words, and got me a lot more confident in my copying skills even if it takes a few tries to really get it.
And that brings me to this latest Ham Challenge completion:
Week 6: Take part in a contest! Any type of event counts. Check out contestcalendar.com for events!
Armed with my trusty Remote Ham Radio Youth station, I set out to participate in the February 21st, 2025 edition of the K1USN Slow Speed Test. In the process I made 7 QSOs (logged in my own home brew logger, another blog post on that to come) with stations around the US, copying callsigns, names, and states. Some even pushed me by going above and beyond the usual exchange which was a welcome challenge!
I didn’t keep track of a score, but if I had to guess I don’t think I worked any duplicate states so it was probably around 14 points with multipliers. But I had a fun time and I’m working up to some more CW activity. My end goal is hopefully some CW POTA with my QCX+ and a lightweight antenna, but that’s a bit off in the future.
So, I’ll call this Ham Challenge week 6 complete, and hold off on calling Week 38 (Make a contact on Morse code!) complete for now. I’ll knock that one out with a non-contest exchange - maybe a POTA, but not something so set in stone or slowed down to my pace. Good luck to all with their own contesting endeavors, and 73 for now!