90 Day CW Challenge: Week Two Update

After the reddit 90-day CW challenge was brought forth by /u/cadr, I too decided to really knuckle down and learn the code. I’ve been “learning” it for almost 10 years, and I’ve been in a handful of contests, worked a handful of DX, and even won a QLF competition at an ARRL convention. But now I have been absolutely dying to do more portable and POTA-style operations, and bust through my local QRM at home using something other than FT8.

To do this, I would start LCWO.net from scratch at 20WPM character speed and 5WPM effective speed (Farnsworth timing), learn the characters, and progress onto words and call signs, then QSOs. To keep me motivated and to kill a few birds with one stone, I decided to live stream every session on my YouTube channel and Twitch.tv. I also wanted to re-invigorate my YouTube channel and break into Twitch with ham radio stuff, so this was the perfect opportunity to do that. Plus I get a few viewers every night that either learn along with me or provide me hints and tips. I’m really thankful there are people out there crazy enough to watch me! I also want to have a record of progression so I can tell the next guy exactly what I did and how I did it (in the case that this whole thing is actually successful).  And you never know who you might meet – one of my viewers being the same guy who started the $4,000 matching program for the YOTA-Americas Camp in Cincinnati this year! I had no idea until he emailed me with encouragement, and to share his own progress buckling down to get more proficient, signing off with his call sign. Small world!!!

Anyway at only “10 minutes per session” I thought that there’s no way I couldn’t find time in my busy schedule for 10 minutes. Turns out, I found 30 (which is about how long I stream for since I have some discussion and viewer comments). I don’t even know what I was doing before but before setting my foot…or fist down, I must have thought that time was important. Its proof positive that you DO have time to learn CW.

So last night was the first break I took from CW in 14 days. I was sick last night and immediately went to bed after getting home from my 9-5. In that time I’ve made 104 one-minute long practice attempts, getting up to lesson 26, which includes the letters (in order of learning): K M U R E S N A P T L W I . J Z = F O Y , V G 5 / Q 9 and still to go: 2 H 3 8 B ? 4 7 C 1 D 6 0 X

I have been practicing every night at 7pm, give or take, and streaming my practice sessions to YouTube and Twitch.tv. I have learned a lot from my viewers, and they’ve been sending me many great suggestions such as:

• Start learning words and QSOs! Learning gibberish might be detrimental.
  • I found that LCWO has a setting that lets you use only letters learned so far, but I tried that and really didn’t get the hang of it; I had to repeat words like 4 or 5 times to catch enough characters to fill in the blanks.
• I am starting to agree (more on that below).
• If you want to work on sending on PC, try CWCom. You can use a mouse, keyboard, or real CW key via serial, and you can also chat with other people on it. And the CW sounds good! (I tried and then closed the program in embarrassment after not being able to copy a single character from a real person…I’m just not there yet)
  • Yes the website is designed poorly and the software was made for Win NT but trust me, it works. Iambic works perfect and sounds amazing; straight key works too but the key-clicks can get kind of annoying.
• Change the speeds up and down, don’t just sit at 20wpm, 5wpm effective.
  • I did notice some improvement at slower and faster character speeds; in fact I’m quite surprised that even at 40wpm I still make out most of the characters, but I still have a long “processing” time.
• Do CWAcademy!
  • I know about the program but I didn’t for a few reasons – first I wanted to learn the characters on my own at first using tried and true methods, and second, I wanted to do it NOW! The waitlist for CWAcademy means it wouldn’t start for at least a few months. I am definitely going to join in once I’ve got a solid copy on letters and words in LCWO.

Some things I’ve noticed:

• I’ve almost always passed the first attempt each day, with accuracy slowly dwindling over the course of the session
• F, L, and Y are the 3 toughest characters for me, by far
• iOS has like no good CW learning apps, nowhere near the level of IZ2UUF’s. Morse Toad is alright for character training, but the vast majority of iOS CW apps are just Text-To-CW translators, without any verification or training system.
• I turn into a CW pickle after about 7 or 8 attempts, at which point I can’t do better than 20% errors
• LCWO teaches the comma (,) character (- – . . – -) but nobody actually uses that on the air. I wish I could remove characters from the standard lessons.
• I don’t actually know why the characters are taught in this order (vs. G4FON for example)
• Any attempt at CW with a real human or pretend QSO shuts my brain off completely. Even trying to decode a bulletin is impossible. I still need the 0.5s-1s of processing time between characters except for the word TEST, 599, my callsign, my name, or 73.
• I can still send well (I got proficient with sending by the time I was 17), far higher than my receive speed, but ONLY if I’m reading text. If I’m just sending from brain, I go just about as fast as I can receive with that extra space in between characters.

With those two last bullet points, I’m starting to believe that Farnsworth timing is really killing my future progress into higher speeds. I was thinking that a better way might be to learn CW in groups of a few letters at a time at full rate, increasing the numbers of characters per group until words can be formed. After all, that’s how language works. Those thoughts were vindicated when I read the exact same thing on another reddit thread. I’m starting to believe this tried-and-true method isn’t so true any more.

Additionally, I’m doubting that the gibberish random-letter method might not be the best either, but the only evidence I have is anecdotal. Shouldn’t I be learning real words, call signs, and prosigns and other QSO elements if that’s what I’m working towards?

So now I’m curious what your thoughts on different methods to learn characters and Farnsworth timing are, or any other words of advice at this stage.

Thank you all for your encouragement so far!