My quest to learn CW (27) CWA Intermediate finished

 

Finally the CW Academy Intermediate course has finished. It was tough at times. If you do this course you need at least exercise for 1 hour a day 8 weeks long. That is a lot of commitment. Besides that you actually need to make some CW QSOs and of course there is a video meeting twice a week. It was not easy to do the hour training every day, especially in the weekends. Other chores are waiting, I'm rebuilding the second floor of the house, have to go to the job through the week. The family does not always understand you need to do homework. The other participants had the same issues of course and it was nice to talk about the progress but also about the things you encounter. We had a nice group of people that followed the course and we decided to stay in contact after the course sharing our CW learning progress. 

Click on the picture to get a readable one.

What I found most difficult is the LCWO random letters/figures. I already did train that for over 2 years but it is still difficult to get it at a good speed. 25/25 wpm is far too fast. I'm now at 25/20 wpm and struggle with about 60-80% score. But I keep on doing that almost every day. Also short stories at 25/18 wpm and higher are too fast for me. I recognize some words but don't know what the story is about. It might be easier if it was in my native language. But some things went very well. Training words with 25/25 wpm is no problem at all, english sentences with 25/22 wpm about 80-100% score and Morserunner at 25 wpm is a lot of fun! Overall I think I made nice progress in the last 2 months and I'm confident that a QSO at about 18 wpm should be no problem. 

Well, I keep on training in this quest to learn morsecode. I wish to thank again PE2V Vincent and PA3GPX Rene for their time and efforts to cheer us up and do exercises at the video meetings. And of course I thank the fellow participants in the intermediate course. Vincent suggested I should take the advanced course, I will think about that. 

Future goals now are:

- Making more CW QSOs. For now that will be "standard" QSOs probabely with a cheat sheet.

- Take a look at the https://morsedx.com/ site to see if this is something for me to improve my speed.

- Continue with my daily LCWO training.

Related link in Dutch:

https://pe2v.nl/cwops-cw-academy-intermediate-klas-week-8-jan-feb2026/

Meshcore experiments

 While I am not on meshcore all days it is interesting to see some ideas that are developed. One of them is the MC-Radar. A nice website were you can visually see your propagation paths if you send a message on the #mc-radar channel and if it is received by a station that sends the info to their server.

Above all the paths last 24h over the Netherlands. Below my own paths after the first "test" message.

Site can be found here: https://mc-radar.woodwar.com/. You will also find interesting graphs about the network on this site.

A mesh network is nice. But real big reliable distances cannot be made. There is still too much collision of all the packets. It is interesting though and nice to experiment with. If you had it with all these stupid test and other messages you can also take your car and measure meshcore signals while driving. This maps the meshcore network in real time. I did some experiments and have been mapping signals while driving. This is done by this website: https://mapme.sh/

If you want to take part you need a bluetooth enabled browser on your GSM. For my Iphone I use a browser called "BLE link". The website to connect with your meshcore device and upload data can be found here: https://mapme.sh/connect.html

Do you know any more interesting experiments? Or do you know what to do with the meshcore network next. Let me know, I'm always interested. In the mean time I will be on meshcore at times, to read and see how things evolve.

PACC 2026 review

 

27MHz how???

    I decided to participate in the QRP mixed section again but only do CW. I was not able to participate till the end and begun late on Saturday. Stopped early at 9:30 UTC. I did meet my goal of working all the CWA students and advisors in the CWops CWA Intermediate 2026 course here in the Netherlands.

In total I did about 10 hours of contesting. I'm satisfied with the results. However my most important goal was to make less errors. Not shure if that happened. Especially during the late evening and later Sundaymorning I went tired and not as sharp anymore. I remember I had a big problem to copy a S58 station, luckily he kept repeating his call and after at least 6 times I got it. There were also stations that kept keying at high speed. Probabely not realizing this costs time after all because I kept asking for repeats. But overall decoding CW went well I think. I see an big improvement in numbers copy which I do now nearly automatic.

White=several bands Purple=80m Blue=40m Yellow=20m Brown=15m Pink=10m

Some highlights J38TT on 10m and JR6CSY on 15m. I also contacted FR/UR9IDX on 10m but he was probably not in the contest, I worked him anyway. The station in Africa can't be right, SM5XU/5OO repeated his call several times so I put it in the log, strange. I realize I have it wrong. Could it be SM5/UX5OO? Most likely yes, UX5OO is an existing call. I will correct this. It is easy to mix up the X with a slash. Another error is something in the log I can't explain yet. It seems I have made CW QSOs on 27MHz???. Not possible at all....have to check out what this error is. Never had this before...

A total of 47 DXCC were worked. The PACC is not really a DX contest. Most participants are from Europe and Russia. There are a few from USA/Canada but most of them are in the WW RTTY contest which is also running this weekend.

I had a lot of fun again. And doing CW is still a big challenge for me. With morserunner I train to get the call in 1 time. But in reality I have to ask for at least one repeat before I have the whole call. I also am not really fast in typing in the calls. Some stations already made a 3 time repeat before I typed the call and hit enter. For the first time in this (and any other) contest I did 99% running. I did some S&P but this was only to find an empty spot to run. I have to write that I didn't have to call long to get a pile-up. And when someone was spotting me the frequency went crazy. But overall I kept cool and quiet, with some patience I did work everyone who was calling. 

This year was not my best score. But I don't really care. I don't want to have a trophy, I just want  to have fun and relax. Winning this section is not within reach for now. I keep training with CW and hope next year it will get better.