[karc] Re: KARC Tuesday Night Net CW Practice and Contest (Results)
- From: Phil Somers <pwsomers@xxxxxxxx>
- To: karc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Clarke <rvclarke54@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:38:45 -0800 (PST)
The e-mail from Bob VE3GLO regarding how the Bobs and the others learned and
used their CW skills, and all his other thoughts on CW were great. Very
stimulating! Bob, I suggest you offer those comments for inclusion in the KARC
Newsletter.
I have been thinking of some additional ways we can promote CW locally and help
those who want to improve their CW skills. My first thought was 2-metre CW but
not many people have the equipment for normal A1 CW on 2-metres. Some have
transceivers that do FM/SSB/CW on 2-metres. There are transverters around from
10m - 2m that you can use with HF equipment. I think F1 is an authorised mode
on 2m. That is essentially what I have been doing on Tuesday nights. Maybe it
is not strictly according to the bandplan, but I think the bandplans are
agreements among hams as opposed to government regulations. I don't see in the
bandplan any space for F1 simplex and certainly not for an F1 repeater. It
probably isn't practical to have an F1 repeater with the demand for repeater
frequencies. But if it is, I think a Kingston FM repeater for exclusive FM CW
would be very interesting and very useful, and would be a strong promotion for
amateur radio in Kingston. To use it,
normal FM rigs would need to be slightly modified. The easiest would be to use
a CW code practice oscillator in front of the microphone. Better would be to
have an optional microphone input. A computer could be used as the code
practice oscillator and/or keyer.
My second thought was: Is there anything for CW on the Internet similar to
Echolink for voice? Echolink could be used with a tone generator for CW. It
would work ok. But there actually are at least a couple of CW Internet
possibilities. I tried what appears to be the best one by far. And it really
works wonderfully.
It is called CW Communicator or CWCom. You download the software and install it
on your computer. You send CW in several ways. You can use the "down arrow" or
another key as the CW key. You can connect a straight key or an iambic keyer to
one of the serial ports, or you can send with the keyboard and from a file,
etc. The program decodes and prints both your outgoing CW and the incoming CW,
but you don't have to look at it if you want to copy by yourself. You can
connect to a server where there are other stations to connect with. You can
connect directly between any two computers on your local LAN or over the
Internet. Or you can send CW text messages via a bulletin board server or
directly. The whole system is very well done and for me, it worked the first
time. No problem with opening ports, etc in the router. I have hooked up my
Bencher paddle and it works great in the serial port. There is no ham callsign
authorisation process like Echolink. There
are some people calling themselves SWL-xxx, probably people learning the code.
There are no ports (that I know of) to the ham radio RF bands outside the
Internet.
The main webpage is: http://www.mrx.com.au/ . Instructions are at:
http://www.mrx.com.au/images/cwcom_help.htm The default server that the
software uses is not currently active. The active server is
morsecode.dyndns.org, as shown on the two pages above. To see who is on, and
maybe looking for a QSO, go to http://morsecode.dyndns.org/index.html don't
think there are many users at the moment. However, I logged into channel 1000
and within 10 minutes I got a call from W4WXA in Goergia and we had a very nice
QSO, both doing manual CW.
So you could arrange to meet someone on one of the channels at a certain time,
and bingo, QRM-free CW. Like Echolink, it is great for people who can't have
antennas or an HF station. So I'd like to do some CW with someone locally on
this mode. It is easy to get installed and operating. I think it would be very
useful for code practice. Lots of possibilities.
... Phil VE3HST
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