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/

https://pa8e.nl/finished-cw-academy-intermediate/