Interesting. Of course, I never gave a hang for contests, but I recall the
RPN (Rochester Peanut Whistle Net) that we had years ago. We met evenings
on 15 CW. I'm trying to recall ... there was me (then WB2OSP), Tim WB2KAO
(still has that call), Greg WB2GLK (now a 4 call and I'm not sure ... I'd
have to look it up), Mike (WA2SEY now W2AV) and a couple of others. I can't
imagine us getting on a bunch of evenings only to state rrr tnx fer call ur
5nn here in Rochester,, ny (heck, we were all from Rochester!). I enjoyed
rag chewing, and preferred cw back then. When in the service, I usually
split my operating around 1/3 ssb, 1/3 cw, 1/3 rtty. I used to talk via
rtty with Norm, VK2NP, for hours on end. ssb and cw contacts were usually
in the range of 15 minutes to half an hour. Even a cw contact for 15
minutes did consist of far more than simple weather, rig, etc exchanges as
my cw contacts were fairly high speed cw (usually - although I did enjoy
dropping into the novice 40 or 15 meter bands to give a few folks a chance
to work something more than a couple of states away. Those were usually
limited as you imply simply by the limitation of slow cw). The cw contacts
close approached the limit of the rtty gear running a tape reader. rtty was
60 words per minute, too much for me, but at the time I had no problem
putting 40 words per minute perfect copy on paper and 50 words per minute
before I was struggling to copy it. Most of my contacts were between 30 and
50 words per minute cw. Come to think of it, a lot of voice contacts were
just what you mentioned - signal, weather, rig, name, and - oh yes -
*please* QSL.

Don't get me wrong; I don't care whether someone else want to learn code or
not; I just don't care for a bunch of folks who want to blame it for their
washing machines over-sudsing As far as carpel-tunnel, I never used a
straight key (although I could send decent code to about 22 and shaky code
to about 28 with one). A small amount of movement and the Hallicrafters
HA1-TO keyer took care of the tough stuff A few hours of cw contacts
never bithered me a bot.


73 from Rochester, NY
Jim AA2QA


"Kim W5TIT" wrote in message
...

Wow, most of the CW operators I've known even state that all they "pretty
much" do is exchange information. Most of them also only use it during a
contest, though. Maybe that's the difference.

Kim W5TIT





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