Month: January 2020

90 Day CW Challenge: Week Two Update

After the 90-day CW challenge was brought forth by on reddit, I too decided to really knuckle down and learn the code. My progress after 14 days has been pretty good!

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

Statistics over my whole CW learning experience. Notice I can bust out a lot of letters in one go, often separated by up to 10 struggle-riffic attempts.

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!

I can’t be an ARRL Director and I am sad about that. But also not.

Good that you remembered this from the last article.

In 2018, a lot of things changed in my life. I got married, I bought a house, I changed my last name, I changed my job, and I changed emails. In all of that commotion I had no less than 54 venues – banks, credit cards, airlines, hotels, passport, drivers license, etc etc etc – to update. Unfortunately for my chances to become an ARRL Director this year, one fell through the cracks, which was my ARRL profile.

My membership lapsed officially on March 31, 2019. I didn’t notice the missing QSTs, nor did I receive the renewal emails and mailings since they were being sent to my old home address (and the USPS failed to forward any of my mail to my new address, as I came to find out well after this was all said and done).

On the morning of June 14, 2019, I got a message from a coworker (and ham) to read an article that might interest me that was March’s QST, and so I tried to log in to ARRL to access Digital QST, but I couldn’t. And that’s when I realized…

Oh no.

Oops.

That’s where all my QSTs have gone!

(Wait why aren’t they being forwarded by USPS…)

I immediately renewed my membership and read the article, and updated all of my ARRL member information and all was good.

Fast forward 7 months: the ARRL CEO is kicked out, the ARRL Midwestern Division Director is up for re-election this year, and I suddenly have an urge to run for the Director so I can pursue my goals of getting the ARRL modernized and relevant, and more interested in youth initiatives, engagement, and recruitment.

I frantically emailed past friends who were directors and other ARRL staff and leaders to get a pulse on whether or not it’s a good idea (sorry y’all!), and I start getting some advice from other N0SSC.com readers that it might be a great idea. Low-key growing some hype there.

I’m reading the ARRL Articles of Association and By-Laws (to make sure I’m not a big idiot on the internet) and then suddenly, out of nowhere, I remember this 75-day lapse in membership happened this year and now my hopes and dreams of infiltrating the ARRL’s upper echelon with my brilliant ideas of youth advocacy are dashed.

I sent a message to the ARRL’s Assistant Secretary Dan Henderson (N1ND) just to be sure I couldn’t get by on a technicality or exception, but he told me the Ethics and Elections committee would not be able to render a decision until I had submitted my petition for nomination; in other words, only after I campaigned, petitioned, and submitted my application in July would I know whether or not they would let me actually be a director. I’m also told by another director (who was initially inspiring me to run in the first place) that someone was recently disqualified for the same exact reason, only having lapsed a few months too. I certainly don’t want to be that guy. To do all of that work, blowing up the status quo, touring ham fests, calling and sending letters to hams, and growing support for my campaign all to fall flat on my face due to my membership lapse is definitely NOT the right foot to start on.

It’s sad because throughout college I told myself that once I graduated I’ll buy a Lifetime membership, only coming to realize the $1225 fee is a hard pill to swallow when you’re sinking $3000 into your student loans and all you get is a stinkin’ magazine full of irrelevant ads for the rest of your life (and the warm and fuzzy feeling that you jipped the ARRL out of at least $1,600 for it too!) (that’s not actually a warm and fuzzy feeling) (also sometimes I really like QST articles).

Thankfully, there is more than one way to skin the cat. I continue to help lead the Young Amateurs Radio Club as well as Youth on the Air (which needs your donations by the way!!!) and through those programs I think I can bring considerably more influence on amateur radio as a whole (and still have a positive influence on the ARRL directors and other leaders) than being a director myself. Plus I don’t have to worry about jumping headfirst into a boiling cauldron of who-the-heck-knows. It’ll be nice to let the CEO drama blow over and things to settle down before I start poking that bear, and also investigate other ways to bring some of my ideas to the table.

But just so you know – the battle may be won, but the war is far from over. Look out for me in 2023.

Meanwhile if you’re in the ARRL’s Midwest division (IA, MO, KS, NE) and you share my vision for ARRL, AND you’ve definitely been an ARRL member for at least 4 continuous years prior to 2020, I hope your name will be on my ballot. Also worth mentioning again that the Atlantic, Dakota, Delta, and Great Lakes divisions are up for reelection this year as well.

Also I’ll be submitting my resume for CEO ok thanks bye

jk.















or am i?

How to run for the ARRL Board of Directors (Because I think they need it)

The ARRL loses another CEO, whats going on? Only one way to find out…

Today’s news of ARRL’s CEO Howard Michel (WB2ITX) being “voted out” by the Board of Directors is another strike in the saga of the League’s struggle in finding new leadership after Dave Sumner’s (K1ZZ) retirement.

I thought Howard was doing alright. He showed up to a lot of hamfests, spoke at many club meetings and conventions, and generally shared a message of optimism regarding the future of the ARRL. I suppose that message was not well-received by the Board. Nobody seems to have any idea why the board voted him out. If I had to speculate, it might be some sort of conflict of interest (the ARRL has a VERY long section of COI in their By Laws), while the MyARRLVoice people are saying that “the ARRL BoD did not judge his job performance to be satisfactory and decided a change in leadership is necessary.”

UPDATE!

UPDATE 2 (26 Jan 2020): Southwestern Director Dick Norton N6AA addressed the following claim and discussed the decision in somewhat more detail in K7AGE’s video from Quartzfest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7o2nBPQZ0g

Additionally I spoke with the Central and Midwest Division Directors (W9XA and K0DAS) at the St. Louis Winterfest, but they did not disclose any new facts, reiterating that the CEOs contract wasn’t renewed and to wait until the minutes are released for more information.

UPDATE 1 (20 Jan 2020): I did some digging and I was led to Howard’s Facebook page, where he posted about his company’s robot last year. To me this implies that was still actively working for or had obligations with his Chinese robotics company, which the ARRL By Laws #35 seems to frown upon. It might also be a conflict of interest, though as written COI by laws seem to only apply to directors, vice directors, president, and vice president. Obviously, I am not a lawyer. Do note that this isn’t a smoking gun, and from what I’m told there are myriad other factors that lead to his removal.

Screenshot of facebook.com/howard.michel.3 (public profile), 21 Jan 2020 09:39CST. I haven’t friended him, so this is public!
From http://www.arrl.org/arrl-by-laws: ARRL By Law #35 implies the CEO shouldn’t have another job. Doing so also probably violates conflict of interest by laws but again I am not a lawyer and there’s likely other reasons leading to his removal.

His departure comes at a particularly awkward time for the St. Louis Winterfest where he was slated to speak at ARRL Forum and a banquet next weekend (January 24-26, 2020). We’ll see how that shakes out!

We’ve seen a lot of drama in the ARRL over the last 5 years. Tom Gallagher (NY2RF) became CEO, Dick Norton (N6AA) was publicly censured, Ria Jairam (N2RJ) was elected as Hudson Division director, N6AA was un-censured, Tom retired as CEO, and Howard Michel came on as CEO leaving 2 years later to the day. Meanwhile many threads of dwindling membership, lack of transparency, signs of internal political infighting and inaction have been popping up all over the place. The Parity act, the CalFire Repeater debacle, a number of natural disasters have also came and went, all putting a lot of pressure on the ARRL to get things done.

I think a big, BIG change is needed at the Board of Directors level. I think Ria N2RJ is the first of many new faces to save the Board from it’s incumbency.

Meanwhile I have been thinking…what would it take to get on the ARRL Board of Directors?

What does it take to run for ARRL Board of Directors? It’s actually quite simple: Be 21 years of age, be a licensed ham and ARRL member for at least four years prior to nomination, and don’t have any conflicts of interest. All you need after that is to get nominated and elected by ARRL members of your division. Easy, right?

I think I might give it a shot before I turn 30.

What would you do if you were on the ARRL’s Board of Directors? Split QST from members-only? Make youth membership free? Livestream Board meetings? Push updates to the website and store?