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Does anyone here have any experience with LICC? In particular, is their 12/8 to 12/12 then speed up approach effective?
It seems directed at getting on the air quickly and they say "there is no 25/8 on the air"

I'm interested on the communities feedback on this one as well!

This is how I learned CW - 12/12 - and so did the other participants in this 1979 morse course. Took us 6 months to learn CW and 3 months to bump up speed to 16/16 to pass the then compulsory exam. We could go on the air straight after that.

So this worked very well for me. And don't forget: with today's ufb PC programs for PC you can quickly bump up speed after that, my favorite for that is still RufzXP

GL

Gerd.

I think 12/12 to start with is BS. Even 20/20 is not fast enough to get you on air. I still count dits and dahs at 20 wpm.

oc:

I estimate most hams that use CW as mode, are not reliable on 20 wpm for rag chewing. They fail obviously when you try to turn a QSO to plain text, compared to the vy limited subset of cw abbreviations. like tks mni vy gd rst name QRN QRM QRX QSB QSO QTH = ? hi oc om cuagn 73

This is very interesting. Are most CW QSOs this formulaic?

I'm no expert, as I haven't been on the air myself, but from what I've read and seen so far, I would say: yes. I find this YouTube video explains the basic formula of a QSO pretty well:

"The Anatomy of a CW QSO" by David Casler (13min45sec)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY6Q9_Qmk8Q

As the video says, of course you can continue the QSO further after going through this basic formula, but I think that's what PREPPERS means: Once you leave this standardized formula and get into plain text / ragchew, many hams will not be able to follow.

How many HAM's do speak English? As a more or less native language? A standardized format made them tackle this. How many hams do use keyboard CW or push memo buttons and use app - software decoding? A lot of my friends make "contacts" e.g. call + 599, this way. The more, the better.

Maybe if all you want to do is contests, yeah. In which case a pre-programmed keyer would do the job.

There was a time I used to watch these "Be a CW contest king without knowing any morse at all" videos on Youtube.

Very sad. Makes me wonder if I should carry on.

There are plenty of operators every evening on 80/40m over here in Europe (including myself) that are capable and willing to make contacts that go well beyond the minimum exchange of information.

Don't be discouraged. There is something for everyone (from contesters to rag chewers) in this hobby.

73
Fabian

I am daily training to be a rag chewer one day. I am not a contester. The progress is very, very slow, but (at my age and dyslexia) I am still making progress. I was warned by my Elmer. Still not discouraged and having fun with Ham and morse.

I use different accounts for easy setup and other purpose, Hi, Nico.

I use different accounts for easy setup and other purpose, Hi, Nico.

Phew, that's good news.

What makes you sad and why? Unfortunately cheating is part of human nature.

Incidentally, I think the root problem for us who have been around for so long and yet are not fluent in morse is the fall (at least in Europe and at least in UK) of radio clubs, who are only interested in new hams getting the foundation licence (or whatever is called in your country) and not getting hams into morse training. The hobby is flooded with so called hams with some VHF/UHF DRM devices and use it like CBs in the 70s.

There was an era that you could only use CW with a reasonable powered transmitter - 50 watt input in a 807 tube -to work dx, with a signal to noise ratio of down to -12 dB but nowadays with forward error correction, reliable connections between computerized sending and receiving stations require only -28 dB, so the fact that cw was the best mode and the reason to use it vanished.

My logic for CW goes like this:
* Low powered rig: 20w, or 5/10w on battery when running shack off grid in low RFI mode
* Simple vertical antenna
* SSB gets me 2000km, but I want further
* CW is more personal than digital modes
* I worked with digital comms both theoretically and practically, professionally. Been there, done it, retired and don't want to go back.
* Casual, non-competitive user. Just want to fire up the rig now and then and be surprised at what turns up.

I monitor the QRP-labs mailing list. I notice a lot of guys using Fldigi to both send and receive. Now, THIS makes me sad.

Yup

if get on the air is one of your goals to learn CW, this is a great advice. 12/12 is much useful than 25/8 on the air.

BTW, POTA/SOTA is a great place to start.

25/8 is rediculous and really a pain to listen to.
12/12 is 12 wpm Morse code is perfect.

So when you learned the characters 25/8 go back to 12/12 and start making QSO's.

Don't try to go to 25/25 before going to make QSO's

In so far as I have a plan at all this is it.
Edit
Doing ok, slow but sure, with 25/8 reading.13/13 sending with paddle into fldigi for decoding.

To each his own. 12wmp is a pain to listen to. Only monolinguals (= native English speakers) think that slowing down is the best way to learn. If anything, communication is easier to understand if it doesn't fall below a certain speed.

If

you

don't

get

it

at

20wmp

you

won't

get

it

at

12wmp.


G

O

O

D

B

Y

E

oc, as remarked by the earlier given link by somebody else to you tube with Dave KE0OG, which I watched, Dave give very good advice. He says: do not type but write on paper lower case, NO CAPITALS. As far as I know the US military write capitals in a prescribed model. They do that afaik up to 17 wpm.
I understand that, because they copy coded groups, and because the code is not a monoalphabetic substitution, reading the wrong chacacter by the decoding dept makes a problem.

You really have to go to 12/12 and after you decode it on paper, you crank up to 13/13 and so on.Copy by head is easier by higher speeds, I agree with you, but it is not the first goal to reach.

Peter, don't worry, I'm like you I want to rag chew and am not interested in contests.

oc - M0***, 20 wpm RX? I'm at 9. I haven't sent much. Trying to get to 12/12, but come the good weather I'm going up the hill for a QSO, no matter how bad I am. I'll do my best!

David, go for it.
I'm going to soon. I reckon a bad CW QSO is better and no QSO.
I would call CQ DE G8GDS/LID if I could master sending "/"

I don't believe this. Walking is always easier than running.

"write on paper" is a good advice, but it prevents us to learn head copy. After I finished lesson 40, I found I have to write down to understand, even wiggling my index finger in the air helps. Now, I go back to lesson 1, don't write down anything, just listen and print the letter in my head as I hearing it.

I think, eventually, I don't even need to print the letter in my head, hearing ".-" will be equivalent to hearing "a", I will see if it will happen.

AG6AQ do not do that.

Go to word exercises start with low fixed speed, short words 3 characters, after that 4 characters.
Repeat each word till you have it in your head, AFTER that type it in.

I'm doing both, and the Koch method allows me to practice more on the letters give me more troubles.

The Koch method was developed almost 100 years ago, based on commercial (=wired telegraphy) morse, optimised for the German vocabulary, doesn't take in consideration that the 4 most common characters used b hams are "C Q D E".

One of these days, if somebody asks, I might publish a poor man's way of training on common mistaken characters, based on simple shell scripts and Linux.

I am using Code Groups and custom character set to do my own kind-of-koch. I can add characters in the order I choose, eg to reinforce learning on common mistakes.

I use custom characters with morse machine for same reason.

Hi oc,
please share your "poor man" method. I am a Linux user and I am very interested in this.
Thanks in advance

73
OK1OO

Err... give me a couple of days. I'd have to write it down. It is a shell function and I'd have to explain what it does. Somebody wrote it for me a couple of years ago.

Ok, so I have tried this on Linux. Will it work on other platform? I don't know.

The only requirements are:

- bash (or compatible shell)
- a program called "morse" or "morse classic" depending on the distribution.

Write and save a text file called "sort-my-cw.sh"

containing this:

#!/bin/sh

echo $1 | sed 's/./&n/g' |sort | uniq -ic|sort -rn;

Then make it executable

chmod +x sort-my-cw.sh


When I finish my custom Code Groups, on the left pane I have the list of all characters I have missed. They are in red (at least on Firefox). The "poor man" part is that you have to feed all these characters to the script, example:

sort-my-cw.sh "b+7f'y(1m(y3==o?ypyey2hs56d'imi6(666"

This will generate:

5 y
5 6
3 (
2 m
2 i
2 =
2 '
1 s
1 p
1 o
1 h
1 f
1 e
1 d
1 b
1 7
1 5
1 3
1 2
1 1
1 ?
1 +
1


Then I feed the most common characters to morse:

morse -f `echo $RANDOM % 400 + 500 | bc` -rC "y6(mi='" -c -eTBq -w 17 -R 5 -M 2

Where:

-f `echo $RANDOM % 400 + 500 | bc` means randomize a tone

-w 17 means speed is 17 wpm

-R 5 means do this for 5 minutes

-rC means randomise from these characters

-M 2 means allow 2 mistakes before stopping.

I hope this helps.

Thanks a lot, I will try it .
ge
OK1OO

Hi, found small typo in command:
sed 's/./&n/g'

it is better :
sed 's/./&n/g'

73
OK1OO

wow, backslash _still_ missing.
it is important to place it before the letter n.

I see. The forum syntax changes some characters. There should be a backlash after the ampersand and before the "n".

https://termbin.com/j97v

If you set the shell to bash or ksh, it should still work.

I found LICW club to be very useful, I stopped using it much because they changed the format a while back. At one time it was online classes with a real instructor, now its all automatic. Guess its not easy to find that many instructors. CWOPS is a free alternative.

I've heard good things about the club on YouTube. Here's the link to an channel that interviews the club https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mr5CdS_w50

I'm still learning, I'm on lesson 13. But I started learning at 30/5 based on the advice from a YouTube video. The presenter explains why starting at 30/5 works. Here's the link to the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT973YhjdR4&t=933s