Category: CW
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Australian Code Breakers
On Wednesday evening I went along to a talk at a nearby library by David Dufty about his recent book ‘The Secret Code-Breakers of Central Bureau – How Australia’s signals intelligence network helped win the Pacific War’ published last year by Scribe. It’s a great story that does uncover previously unacknowledged contributions. Dufty’s interest was…
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Learning morse and touch typing in tandem
I’ve been wondering whether I should try to synchronise my most recent efforts at learning and improving my morse with a similar complementary neural mapping exercise of simultaneously learning to touch type as I practice copying morse code. I was googling around – on the off-chance someone had developed the ultimate piece of software which combined…
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Walter Winchell
I was meandering around the web this morning and stumbled on to a page where famous key collector and curator Tom Perera W1TP had re-created the morse key setup used by Walter Winchell to introduce and punctuate his radio and later TV broadcasts. They were a pair of Vibroplex bugs. I grew up in Sydney in the…
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Reading in your head – the long path to morse code bliss
I’m one of those people who learnt morse code completely the wrong way. Starting off in the seventies with no guide I simply tuned into nightly morse transmissions sent by local hams at a very slow rate. I think they started at 5 words a minute. The main risk there was nodding off between words…
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CW Academy FB
Yesterday I had my final CW Academy session. As an indication of how good it was and how much we valued it, not one of the five of us ever missed a single session! There were sixteen hour-long sessions over two months. And it was all free! Late last year I noticed a couple of messages from…
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New KD1JV ultralight rig for 80/160
There’s been a higher than usual level of activity on the AT-Sprint email list over the last few days as hints have emerged of a possible new offering of the popular MTR (Mountain Topper Radio) the latest of Steve Weber KD1JV’s radios that define the possibilities of ‘trail friendly’. To get a view of one…
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Big Day Out at Wyong
Just back from a few hours spent at the annual field day at Wyong hosted by the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club. This has to be the big day out for Australian radio amateurs. People came from near and far. It’s a good barometer of the health of the hobby and the local industry supporting it.I was delighted to see…
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Waiting list update
On Halloween Steve Weber KD1JV has announced to the AT-Sprint Yahoogroup he’s considering planning to take orders online for the ATS-4B at 11:11:11 AM, EDT on the 11th November, 2011. Clearly a time and date not to be forgotten. Shipping would follow close behind then. One exciting aspect of this latest ATS-4B version is the planned integrated…
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Winnie the war winner
The other day I noticed a very interesting photo on a fellow Australian ham blogger, Peter Mark’s site. The blog entry was titled a “Radio nerd’s tour of Canberra“. The first photo is described as ‘a transceiver with a nifty antenna tuner’. But the instant I saw it I sensed there was slightly more to it.…
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LCWO on iPad & iPhone
Great news for owners of Apple portable devices who want to access Fabian Kurz DJ1YFK’s brilliant lcwo.net site on the move. LCWO stands for “Learning CW Online”. If you don’t know the site and you want to learn morse code or improve your code skills, this is one of the best destinations available – and it’s totally…
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Arnie Coro and the Super Islander
Looking back over some older email list posts today I came across an interesting exchange of posts on the QRPp list. In early August Arnie Coro CO2KK announced latest progress on the ‘Super Islander Version 5 QRP transceiver project’. Key design criteria include using “as much as possible parts that could be recycled from easy to find sources of electronic…
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Subliminal morse
Tim G4VXE posted an interesting ‘random’ thought about one suggestion he’d heard recently on air to raise your CW speed: “one of the ways to improve your speed and competency is to listen to as much morse as you can – for example, have the rig running whilst your watching TV or reading. It’s almost as if…