Before I forget, I wanted to jot down some notes about the Parks on the Air exercises I just did in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Final statistics: Iceland: 11 parks activated (9 the first time anyone had), 382 QSOs, 277 confirmed (as of writing) for 41 countries. For the Faroe Islands, 172 QSOs, 121 […]
Parks on the Air Notes Read More »
I had a lot of fun hunting during the first “contest day” of the CW ARRL DX contest last weekend. 10M was wide-open, with runners as 28.160. Not only did I set a personal record for volume of QSOs in a day, enough confirmed for me to blow past the 100 needed for DX CC
100 Country CW Club Read More »
I wrapped up another field day with my friend Paul (W7PEZ) in Eastern Washington. For the two days, I had 204 contacts, broken out roughly as: Paul worked 200 contacts, nearly all CW. Both are personal records. Neither of us were “running,” which would certainly have bumped up the totals, nor did we operate all
Notes on Field Day 2023 Read More »
During the latter part of my Basic class, when students were becoming more engaged, we ran into several problems with the email and text messaging. As an experiment, we used Slack in my intermediate class the most recent term. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In the spirit of trying to give back, I thought it would be
Using Slack for CW Academy Read More »
Morse Runner is one of a handful of tools (Morse Runner, RufzXP, CW Player, G4FON) that CW Academy uses in its curriculum, primarily with the Intermediate and Advanced classes (though I did try with my Basic), to help them acclimate to rapid head-copying calls they might hear during the event. Since they will be eventually
There is also a walkthrough of N1MM+ here that I did for my intermediate class earlier this week. Some definitions CW – stands for continuous wave, a simple method of communication where a signal is either on or off. It uses Morse Code, consisting of dots, dashes, and spaces. A dot is a tone emitted
Sending in-class: Compose two “Dad Jokes” to send. For example: “Two guys stole a calendar. They got six months each.” (Or: “What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him and pitch to the rhino.”) We’ll practice more sending of longer passages. Revisit the Wikipedia front page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and pick a couple of
CWA Basic: Sessions 14 – 16 Read More »
We’re at the two-thirds/homestretch-ish point in the class. The speed creeps up 1 wpm for each the next few sessions, eventually hitting 13. Remember the overall goals are: having fun, making friends, and picking up a new skill for a lifetime. Absent from these goals is “beating yourself up because you didn’t hit flawless 13wpm
CWA Basic: Sessions 11-13 Read More »