My quest to learn CW (33)

 

Finally after 930 attempts I managed to get a 88% accuracy training english proverbs with a speed of 28/22 wpm. I promised myself to go up in training speed. I will delete all my attempts and start over on 28/24 wpm.

I will also increase my speed in the "lessons" or in other words the random 5 letters/numbers signs which are given for 1 minute. My training speed was 28/20 wpm and will now be 28/22 wpm.

The blue line above is at approx. 70%. You see that it is an up and down process. Some days are good, others are bad. Overall it went better I think. Still random signs are difficult. 

Am I on the right path? Some will say yes, some will say no. I've got fun and like the training and that's important. However after 33 months of practice I still have difficulties to decode morsecode. On the computer with perfect code is not as difficult as on real air. People make mistakes, you need to figure out words and abbreviations that are not really familiar.  I make a lot of mistakes and most of the times I really don't know what to key. When I key it goes wrong half of the time. But never have had a problem with any station at all. It seems every CW operator on air is happy there is a new CW operator active, and it doesn't matter whatever you try to key, they understand.

I'm now at a point that I want to make as many CW QSOs as possible. I look out for easy to work POTA stations and DX. Most of the time it is a 5NN TU report. But sometimes I will throw out a CQ and hope the best of it. Today IK0PIC Luciano came back to my CQ on 12m. I hope he understood what I tried to key since it was not without errors. At least he got my QTH which I managed to key well, which he repeated. Then I saw 10m could be open to Africa. I didn't hear anything on the band so I made a few CQs to wake things up. Surprisingly I heard a very weak HA coming back. It was barely audible. I suspected it was HA7RJA Rob and I was right. I suddenly heard him a bit stronger and was able to get my report and he got my report before the signal disappeared into the noise. A few minutes later I worked 3B9FR from Roderiques Isl. That was a very nice experience today and a lot more fun as making world wide contacts with FT8.