Learning CW

I've been meaning to learn CW for ages now, but never quite got around to it. I downloaded Ray's excellent G4FON Koch trainer a while ago, but university studies got in the way and the laptop I had it on died late last year anyway.

Well I have a break between semesters at the moment, but Ray's program doesn't work on my Linux EeePC, actually not much that I've downloaded to it does work, including the stuff from the Asus website.

Well, a few people have blogged recently about Learn CW Online, so I thought I'd check it out. I'm really glad I did. The beauty of it is, you can use it anywhere, on any computer, since you don't have to download anything. And it's so easy to use, all you do is run the lesson, type in what letter you thing is playing and then analyze it to see how you went. You can check your statistics to see if you're improving, or not. Usually, if I've got a bit of time to kill or I need a break from studying, I'll play a couple of games of Solitare or Soduko on the laptop. With the graph on LCWO I can treat that as a game instead, so it makes it more interesting.

If you've been thinking of learning the code and haven't got around to it yet, check it out.



73 de VK4VSP

We won

Well, sort of.

My brother Laurie, VK4VCC, and I teamed up last year for the CQ WPX SSB contest. We weren't really trying all that hard, in fact we even found time to go shopping, have a barbecue and feed all the animals in between contacts. We did get quite a few new countries into my logbook though. More about that logbook in another entry to come.

Anyway, a large white envelope turned up in my mail yesterday. It was addressed to VK4VSP, so I didn't open it straight away, thinking it was my licence renewal. When I did get around to looking at it, I realised it was to do with the contest.



I joked to my wife that they way the certificate is worded makes it look like we'd won. Reading it properly it does actually mean that we've won the multi-single category for VK4, which is the state of Queensland. Now that might seem to some like quite an achievement, but I have to be honest and tell you, we were the only multi-single station in Queensland. For some reason it doesn't seem to be as popular a category as the others.

I'm not sure if I'll compete this year as I'm probably going to be too busy with work and study. If I do, I might try a more minimalist category this time, maybe QRP on one band. First I have to find a decent contest program that'll work on my little Asus EeePC running Xandros.

73 de VK4VSP