Shortwave wrote:

Time to retire the name.

Group: rec.boats Date: Wed, Feb 1, 2006, 3:57pm (EST+5) From:
(Shortwave*Sportfishing)
On Wed, 1 Feb 2006 09:07:15 -0500, (N.L. Eckert)
wrote:
Shortwave wrote:
100 wpm, while it sounds fast, is slow. i knew a guy who could copy fsk
by ear up to about 75 wpm. back in the day when i was really good at it,
i could copy up to 60 wpm of machine code with damn near 90% accuracy -
i can still do 40 wpm morse with that kind of accuracy, but I begin to
loose it after that.
a great trick i learned from my mother actually (who was a USCG radio
operator at the cape cod radio station during ww two) was to transmit
with my left hand and write with my right. im probably the only one who
does that - at least that ive ever seen.
==================================
Wow! I can't imagine copying 60 WPM in Morse. I was proud of myself for
making it to 25 wpm, but I was only at it for about 8 mos. in the Army.
I think you know what I mean when I say, I was at the point where it
became easier each day. The problem of gaining speed was that we had to
operate at the speed of the slowest operator in the net. Bout 18 WPM. My
goal was to get up to 35 wpm so that I could copy press. But, alas, not
to happen....
i learned morse almost as soon as i would talk - my mother used to have
a practice keyer just to keep her hand in. even when she was in her
seventies she could still copy 25 wpm solid.
the trick to morse is to listen to the word, not the individual letters.
eventually, you learn how to tune out the individual letters and listen
to the code as words or complete sequences.
even when somebody screws up and sends something out of sequence or a
series of wrong letters, you still pick it up - in particular at high
speed.
when the high speed rag chew nets on 75 and 40 meters at night, by the
end of the evening, if you were into high speed code, you could find
operaters in the 50/60 wpm category to practice with. some of these guys
used machines to produce the code, but some were real bug operators and
had their keys tuned so finely that they could actually produce 50/60
wpm morse by hand.
when i started, i used my dads vibroplex presentation bug he received
from his last commanding officer - my dad used to hang in the radio room
during the war when off duty because that was one of his hobbies. i
still use it occasionally just to keep my hand in, but when im in a
morse mood, i use an electronic keyer with a set of paddles set up for
left hand sending.
================================
Thats interesting. I never had the chance to use a "bug" because I was
in the field with a mobile crew. If you wanted a bug, you had to buy
it yourself or have someone send it to you. In school, one of the
instructors told us about listening fo works, but we rarely worked in
clear text, so didn't get much practice. Almost everything was in 5
letter code groups.
Its been about 55 years since I used Morse, but I still catch myself
rapping out stuff in code instead of drumming my fingers. At one point,
we had a net control operator that used a bug and I used to love to get
traffic from him. And his call sign was.. Easy Uncle Two. Had a nice
ring to it.

I had a friend that had been a Merchant Marine radio operator and we
talked about getting some surplus equipment and setting up a ham
station, but we each got married about that time and starting a family
took precedence.