I’ve been able to participate in CW contests and the Triple Play Award by using software to both receive and translate morse code into print as well as send it back to the other operator.  In essence, it makes CW very RTTY like for me. I can already hear certain words such as my call sign, CQ, 5NN, TU without looking at what was translated. I can tell when they come back with a portion of my call sign or have it incorrect just from hearing it and I know I need to resend it.

Of course, that’s not enough to help me work through if the exchange doesn’t go exactly as planned and the CW reader (I use DM780 though I’ve installed CWGet) isn’t able to interpret what is sent back. And it certainly isn’t enough of a solution to make me happy, so I will now embark on learning “the code”.  As a quick aside, it was just recently announced that there were more CW logs submitted for the CQ World Wide contest then phone logs. So CW isn’t dead, despite not mandating a code requirement in the US.

I have a few software programs and web sites to assist with learning the code but none of them seem to be working well for me yet. To be fair, I don’t think I’ve put in any real effort to stick with any one of them long enough to make progress. I also don’t have any keyer. Saturday night, I noticed a MFJ-557 Practice Code Oscillator bundled with some morse code audio CDs on eBay so I went ahead and did a Buy Now and got them. They will probaby arrive the very end of this week or early next week and I’m looking forward to putting in the time to learn the code.

73,
K2DSL