Category: CW
February 13, 2020

I've been setting more and more challenging goals for my Get On The Air goals for my CW Academy Intermediate class I'm taking. This weeks goals is to do some POTA activations using CW. I made 4 contacts with CW on this activation. I was going for 10 but I stopped getting responses to my CQ's so I…
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January 28, 2020

Once again we had Winter Field Day at the Clearwater Fire Training Facility. It's a great location and they give us the run of the training areas. We setup a beam, a rotating dipole, 2 slopers and an off center fed dipole. We ended up with over 1200 contacts and covered every US section. It was a…
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November 25, 2019

I've been working hard on my CW skills. I took the level 2 prep class in the CW Academy and we've been meeting every week in the time between sessions. I've been putting a lot of time into and it's coming together. I figured I'd try this contest without the decoder and see how I did. I was able to…
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November 30, 2018

A year ago today my original callsign(KX4HL) appeared in the FCC database after 9 long days of waiting. It's been quite a year, as of this morning I have 2411 QSOs. Here's some of my QSO cards: I've moved from just a wire antenna to a hex beam on the roof, put up a 2m antenna, built a AMSAT…
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November 26, 2018

I'm still not fast enough to decode contest callsigns in CW on the fly but I read an article about some guys who didn't know any CW and participated in a CW contest using a decoder. The contest logging program I use, N1MM+ Logger has links to one so I tried it out. CW contests are super fun. It's…
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June 2, 2018
I made my first CW contact. It was with my instructor Pete from the CW Academy. I think it went well, it was a little nerve-wracking in the class sending morse code with 4 guys watching you, it's a different kind of pressure when its going out over the air. It's like you can almost feel the power…
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June 1, 2018
I made it through the CW Academy level one Skype course. 4 of us met with the instructor twice a week for 8 weeks via Skype, typically for 45 minutes or so. It's not easy but I definitely feel like I have a better handle on the code now. I studied between 30 minutes to an hour each day. I like that…
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