Read my article: The Secrets of High Speed Morse”, <https://www.eham.net/articles/41222>,
Paul w0rw
Fully agree with you on this, Patrick, head copying CW in your own language is a task and doing it in a foreign language like English, no matter how well you know it and how popular worldwide it is, is an even harder task.
73,
Guru
I learned to pass the written test and could (40 odd years ago) write letters at 12wpm. After a large gap I even found it really hard to even listen to morse without a pencil in one hand. I have recently ( 10 weeks ) been using the Morse DX website and am starting to be able to read it in my head , all be it with absolutely no distractions. I always go for 5wpm faster than my comfort zone. I am also switching from a straight key to a paddle. I have tried a little bit of chasing and am slowly getting there, only calling at the tail end of activations. I have to apologise when I practice with no power out the antenna what comes out isn’t that bad, but on pushing the TX key my brain still has a mini melt down and I’m sure it sounds as if I have been drinking! As well as practice receiving morse in my head I think I also need to work on composing a QSO in my head or have it written in big print - I guess at the moment too much of the coding / decoding is still being done with the concious brain and there aren’t enough brain cycles left for everything else… I presume it is just more practice - so apologies in advance if I slow you down at the end of an activation with qrs cw (14wpm) with the odd error - it really isn’t lack of effort. 73 Paul
My usual problem is confusing ‘H’ with ‘S’ so I think it’s SB9 but realize it must be HB9 when I recognize the “BIN” that follows.
I remember having to spell out umlauted vowels in full in the basic German lessons I was given whilst working for an American company (Motorola) near Munich from 1979-1981. Unfortunately, the working language was English and, in any case, my basic German was far too primitive to have highly technical discussions with my colleagues.
I have nothing but immense admiration for non-native speakers head copying English with its crazy spelling.
Blame the Normans for invading England in 1066 and messing with the language. I think spelling was more consistent in Anglo-Saxon times.
Thanks.
I’ve read it a couple of times Paul after you alerted us on these previous Morse-related threads – thanks - but others may not be aware of it or of those discussions …
Trivial Andy: Hilfe! Mein EXORmacs-Entwicklungssystem ist abgestürzt.
Back to the subject, I find I can do contest QSOs all right at c. 20wpm but as soon as someone deviates into words and stuff I loose it unless the speed is slowed down. I just need to practice the non-QSO wordy stuff.
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From a phonetic POV, in English “C” does not actually exist. All usages of C in English could be represented by S or K. OTOH, English has twenty vowel sounds represented by just five letters. Blame it on a complex history, it wasn’t just the Normans! There has been several attempts to rationalise the spelling in English but none of them have gained any traction - as Brexit has demonstrated, we cling too hard to the past, it is less threatening than the future!
Brian, you’re forgetting Noah Webster whose spelling reforms in his dictionary become the standard in the new American Republic. Some of those changes found their way into British English (e.g. picknik to picnic).
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I’m sure I’ve told you this story before, Andy - I was working there when American colleagues from Motorola Microsystems, Phoenix brought the first EXORmacs to Europe. It took two of them to carry the large and very heavy hard-disk drive that went with it. I bet the disk capacity was laughable by modern standards.
OT skip if you want
Wiki says 14in CDC Phoenix drives. Only seen them in pictures. My first 68000 development systems were assorted Sage II / Sage IV machines and a couple of Apple Lisa computers in 1983. After that we had Mac number 000005 with a 110V PSU just after it came out. Then we got ROM upgrades to turn the Lisa into a Mac XL. Lisa had a 5MHz CPU ISTR.
That takes me back. My first Apple computer at home [then in Massachusetts in 1985] was a second-hand Lisa that my friend’s company were getting rid of. Painfully slow by modern standards with 3.5" disks.
and add in some French too in case they’ve just crossed the border: “cest votre derrière, if it’s non fixee tout suite mon ami!”
I’m by no means a head copier of Morse, but I do find 5wpm to be a bit like listening to an American tourist asking for directions in English from a Japanese hotel worker. It’s very slow and turning up the volume doesn’t help. I’d rather get it wrong (and often do) at 12wpm from a comfort factor.
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I have an opposite experience I find that if I try to write down CW at a higher speed I can’t do it very well. Just proves this Male of the species cant do two things at once. I can head read “well sent” CW up to 35 wpm but I threw my pencil away at about 17 wpm 30 years ago. Its amazing how quickly your speed will improve with regular practice at head copy, I was stuck at 15/17 wpm for ages writing down, then after about a month of regular practice my speed increased and it became easier. Having someone at the other side of the conversation sending nice CW helps too you loose it if he is making lots of mistakes. I stick to about 15 wpm for my SOTA chasers though due to the varying CW experience, I don’t want to put them off.
Persistence and Patients are probably the key aspects to learn any craft Laborious would be the reality unfortunately.
vk5cz …
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Andy
Reading through these posts always makes me eternally grateful for being paid, and taught Morse Code and touch typing by Her Majesty’s Navy.
Learning was for most of us a totally pain free experience and sometimes quite good fun ( such as typing to the beat of music)
Andy, I’m not sure there is a ‘right’ method for learning head copy. We wrote most stuff down - because it was for someone else to read and action, and you cannot ‘head copy’, coded groups, weather reports (in 5 number groups) and so so on. We were deliberately trained NOT to head copy (by having to read/copy coded groups and mixed up letters numbers, punctuation and so on). That way we could read whatever was thrown at us. Anticipation can lead to incorrect guesses as a couple of posters have noted.
I’d never even heard anyone use the term head copy until I became a ham 3 years ago.
All I can say is that since I’ve become a ham and now don’t ‘have to’, write stuff down, just the simple business of casual listening to QSOs between other operators has increased my ability to heady copy by a great extent - for me the letters, numbers & punctuation simply enter my head in much the same way as letters do when written up on a flip chart and gradually make up words.
All I can say is practice, practice and a bit more practice won’t do any harm.
Although I have Ø practice at reading ‘whole’ words I’m not sure practicing listening to “The 100 most common words in English” etc. will help. Many of these words never get used on the air, and won’t help if you anticipate something and it turns out you were incorrect.
However, I can’t remember callsigns I’m not familiar with, so when activating or chasing that sort of stuff always gets written down.
David
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I was quite surprised by how many German speaking hams use the Gerke characters for umlauted letters:
ü . . - -
ä . - . -
ö - - - .
ß . . . - . .
I actually found it easier to learn a few more characters rather than trying to remember to add e. The Morserino 32 automatically translates these signs (user can choose to use the Gerke characters or translate), something that only a few programs are capable of. Ragchewing in German is very hard indeed.
73 de OE6FEG
Matt
David, you make some excellent points.
You confirmed what I suspected about professional radio operators – transcript precision is paramount.
On your last point, I don’t need training with long bookish words in long sentences to head copy SOTA QSOs whilst activating summits [My first goal] and that stuff is better postponed to much later.
So, I’m going to de-emphasize head copying GB2CW [RadCom articles] and W1WA [QST articles] until later and focus on rubber stamp QSOs until my head copy speed is back up to my written copy speed [20wpm]. The Ham Morse app on my phone and iPad generates typical short QSOs with pseudo random content, which will do the job.
73 Andy
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Matt
Isn’t there a CH in German aswell ? - - - -
Yes. I forgot about that. I wonder if anyone still bothers to learn Wabun Morse for the Japanese language? Now there really is a challenge.
73 Matt
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John
It was puzzle to me and no doubt thousands of other ex military and/or civilian morse operators, why on earth ‘head copying’, is some kind of holy grail to be aspired to amongst many ham operators.
All of us who learned in a classroom learned to write and/or type when receiving messages. Of course like the majority of those people, the starting age was probably quite young and the ability to write or type at whatever speed you received at was quite easily obtainable at that age. (I can still write stuff down at 35wpm)
Yes, I appreciate that not everyone can manage to write at that speed especially if they started doing morse at a later stage in life, but other than that there is little advantage in making ‘head copy’ some dogmatic goal.
OK, It might save on paper, pencil, but writing the important bits down whilst they are being sent, means you have a record and you are not having to rely on your memory.
As you say, if you make a conscious effort head copy will come with practice anyway, and you will always be able to write stuff down when, or if, you need to.
David
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David, every time I see the word “puzzle” used by someone like you in the UK, I think about DCI Vera Stanhope, who seems to solve every enigma in exactly 90 minutes, with the help of Kenny and DS Joe.
Elliott, K6EL
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Hi David,
Yes, I can entirely understand that. Years ago I was part of a special event station that was visited by Prince Philip and my job was to have a QSO in progress on CW when he came around. Hearing the CW he made a bee-line for my station and listened intently for a few minutes. He was obviously copying at least some of the QSO and, when it ended his first question was “why aren’t you writing it down?”. I hadn’t expected that and it took me a moment or two to compose my answer, which was that in the amateur world we use plain language and are talking amongst ourselves on CW much as he and I were talking now. Since neither of us were writing down our conversation, it seemed reasonable to do the same thing on CW. He thought that very amusing and we had a good laugh about it.
Formal training in Morse code would, for the reasons you state always involve the written word on both TX and RX. It’s not surprising therefore that this modus operandi carried across into amateur use, even though there was no real reason to do so. I count myself lucky that by accident I learned to do Morse code without writing it down, albeit I have done my fair share of that too over the years!
…writing the important bits down whilst they are being sent, means you have a record and you are not having to rely on your memory.
Of course. And I do exactly that with call signs, name, QTH, etc., these days typed directly into my logging program, just as one might during a phone QSO.
Interesting discussion!
73, John
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