Ham Radio 73 sked on CWCom?

G

GM0WEZ

Super Member
I'm now up and running on CWCom, I was going to take up foggycoder's kind offer of a sked.

However as there are now a few of us on the forum using CWCom I wondered if we could organise a very informal Ham Radio 73 sked for a few days time (maybe Friday evening or Saturday/Sunday?)

What do folks think?

I figured that publicising it in advance would allow else anyone interested some time to get set up.
 
OK, sounds good. Not a TV fan here either!

Does 2130 local (ie 2030 UTC) this Friday evening (16 Oct) on channel 1008 sound okay for you?

I would go for earlier but I'm often stuck at work till late.

Everyone is, of course, welcome. There might well be a few CW enthusiasts lurking on the forum who haven't signed up as forum members - you guys are welcome too.

Of course a CW net with a lot of stations can get ungainly but I suspect there will only be a handful of us.

73

Pete
 
Excellent. Looking forward to it.

The more the merrier so I hope everybody feels free to join in. Slow and/or error-strewn morse not a problem. It's what I'll be sending... ;)

(Of course the benefit of CWCom is that we don't have to contend with QSB, kilowatt QRM just 100Hz away, the second harmonic of Radio Tirana popping up to tell you tractor production is up 300%, Russian woodpeckers, Chinese Firedrakes, the antenna falling down, the PA transistor emitting smoke and all the other well-known delights of radiotelegraphy)
 
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Thanks for the QSO all, it was great fun and I enjoyed it, even if I was only able to copy about 30%.

Maybe a slightly earlier start might be good next time, but I'll definitely do it again.

GN es 73,
Stefan MI0PYN
 
It's was great, thanks everbody. I installed CWcom yesterday for the 1st time, just in time for the sked. If it wasn't for this forum, I would never know about it.

Looking forward to the next sked.
 
Yes, it was a good evening. It wound up at 2150z.

The attendees were:
GM0WEZ - thanks for suggesting it
MI0PYN
M0AYP - Mike, a regular on CWCOM for many years
CT2GXW
M9RSS - that's me
G0KZZ - watching over us

I second the request for an earlier start next time.

If anyone wants a one-to-one QSO, I'd be happy to do that too. Especially anyone who feels they might be a bit slow or nervous or make lots of mistakes - I've been there myself so I know what it's like.
 
Hi Stefan, yes it was a really good net we had going.
Six stations in total:

MI0PYN Stefan
M9RSS Ross
CT2GXW Pedro
M0AYP Mark
GM0WEZ Peter

Four countries... only 96 to go for DXCC! :D

I had to go after an hour but the other lads were still at it! Mike said he'd rarely seen CWCom so busy.

I do need to practice more on CW com with the auto-decode. In some ways it is easier without it, though I suppose it instils good habits. I could copy your code very well by ear.  You can tell who has been using CWCom for a while, it is different from on air!

I often send RRR on air to confirm receipt. Unfortunately CW COM translates my morse as GRR which is definitely not the impression I wish to convey... :(

It was such a success I suggest we make a regular weekly net or perhaps 'activity time', so folk can check into the net if they are free, but don't feel at all obliged to either. And I agree a bit earlier would be good.

There seems to be a tendency to name nets these days (eg the early morning 'shaving net', and the Scottish 'northern lights net') so if we can come up with a name, a time and a day we can see how it goes. I guess just calling it the Ham Radio 73 net makes sense as it helps promote the forum.

 
I'm up for trying next week though, at 2030BST, and to try for an on-air sked too maybe, propagation permitting. Unfortunately I only have 40m for inter-G working, but it's worth a try.
 
Stefan, would be great to arrange a sked over the air with you. Unfortunately I just snapped the AF/RF gain pot of my Kenwood 480 trying to fix it, and now I need to get a spare. My antenna is also cut for 40m, and it's facing north, so we should be able to make a contact. Will let you know once I fix my rig.
 
Cool beans mate, I'll start a different thread for the on-air sked so as not to derail this one :cool:
 
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Most of us come from a radio background and learned Morse to communicate over the airwaves. If code can be copied by the other person, then the basic requirement has been satisfied. Human ears and brains are obviously better at copying imperfect fists and marginal code (like mine) than software which only decodes code well when it is sent within very tight parameters. However, if the transcript was able to convey the messages which appeared to be copied fine by human operators, even if it did so imperfectly, it is not flawed.

I also found that I was able to copy some of the slower operators OK, even if CWCom could not, and that was of more satisfaction to me than reading what someone else sent faster than I could copy off the screen.

I only care about the quality of sent code to the extent that I or someone else can comfortably copy it, I'm not trying to achieve perfect copy by some software, I know I'll never achieve perfection, but if I can communicate with another person, I've achieved my goal.
 
MI0PYN said:
...I only care about the quality of sent code to the extent that I or someone else can comfortably copy it, I'm not trying to achieve perfect copy by some software, I know I'll never achieve perfection, but if I can communicate with another person, I've achieved my goal.
Click to expand...

Fully agree :cool:

73, Mark...
 
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I've tried various morse reading programs to see if they can copy my hand-sent straight key morse. In fact, I think CWCom translation is probably the best one I've come across.

I think my dahs can be longer than 3 dits, which is usually not a problem for reading by ear (sometimes people do this deliberately when conditions are bad), and CWCom copes very well with this too.

The various programs differ though - I notice CWCom is quite particular about the separation between words, and if you're not careful no space appears and it runs two words together - but I have used other morse programs that put a space in rather too easily, so I guess it depends on the algorithm used. I've also noticed I need to be careful with words like the and that. Being common words, they are there in the muscle memory and maybe come out slightly too fast. It is therefore very easy to leave a slightly too short gap between the T and the H, and you get '6' instead of TH.

I have noticed too that if you sit down and send a fair bit of text into CWCom then either it adapts to you, or you adapt to it, or both, and the copy improves a lot. And I suppose if CWCom is copying you then the morse is close to how it should be so it is a good learning aid.

Anyway, overall I think CWComm is great. I only started using it last week and I've been practicing on it a lot.
 
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