My quest to learn CW (34)

 

Time is my enemy. But I try to practice CW everyday. With the speed going up it is like starting all over again. How many days will it take to get at 88% or above again?

The random 5 characters per line in 1 minute training for accuracy is with 28/22 wpm even more difficult. I noticed I got about 20 faults average. But once I was lucky and got only 5 faults. Good days and bad days!

I had some interesting CW QSOs this month. Most intriguing was with VE3SPY. I was intending to do a short QSO just before dinner. But the operator kept asking. After the QSO and dinner I search for him on QRZ. An amazing story... and now I know why the SPY.

I had a short discussion about CW contesting with top CW contester PA4O  on a club evening last friday. I told him I wanted to focus on contesting a little more especially for the CQWW CW in November. He recommended rufzXP training software to me as that is what he does training with. I have been doing rufzXP before and last weekend I tried a few times again, a lot of fun!

#6m #4m ES-season 2026 review

 A small review about the magic band(s) this year. I didn't have much time to monitor all the time and so I probably missed some DX. I know of one evening there was strong propagation to Colombia and Ecuador but although I saw stations with very good signals I was not able to make any QSO. The propagation was widespread across Europe so I was certainly not the only one calling at that moment, sometimes some spotty propagation is better if the spot is right at your QTH. Well, there is always a next time. 

Photo from M0OXO.com

13-May-2026: Quite early in the ES season I worked the first 6m new one this year, XT2AW from Burkina Faso. What can I tell. Signals were reasonable strong and the contact was easy. Working stations on 6m from Africa is always kind of unique.

On the first day of June we had some propagation to South America. June is always the best month for the ES season as far as I know and experienced.

8-Jun-2026: Almost as expected I worked OE3FVU as my only new one on 4m this year. The signal came up, we made the contact and as fast as it appeared it went into the noise again.

20-June-2026: Second new on 6m. This time FS/K9EL from St.Martin. It shows the importance of watching the greyline. Most of my DX has been made at evening greyline including this one.

27-June-2026: A warm day full of good propagation. In the end I managed to work Haïti which was my 3rd and last 6m new one this year. 

Overall there were some DX possibilities but as always it is the magic that has to happen at the time that we are on air.

Bloggers blogroll still broken

 

Some of you probably noticed that something is wrong with the blogroll at te right part of this blog. After Mike VE9KK wrote me an e-mail I noticed that it is not updating with new feeds. Mike and others with a "blogger" blog experience the same problem. Unfortunately it is a problem that google has to solve. We cannot fix this ourselves. I hope this will be solved soon.