Bookmarked Seth Godin - The 100 Hour Asset

We’re all so busy doing our work that sometimes we fail to build a skill worth owning.

@AndySylvester 100 hours in learning Morse Code would get you pretty far. 1,000 hours and you would be very proficient at the end, if you went about learning it correctly.

@Ron good comment! I think 100 hours of focused effort on any skill would have results.

@AndySylvester That's right. But I find that growing older tends to focus the mind better on something you really care about. You no longer feel you have unlimited time.

@AndySylvester Excellent, I'm glad you're asking! I don't know W6REC, but I see he's four years older than me, so it's possible he grew up in ham radio around the time that I did. I notice that he says he wrote this piece 30 years ago. I started in ham radio in 1959 and in those days to get licensed as a ham, one had to first pass a CW test, sending & receiving Morse Code at 5 wpm. This was a barrier to some people to getting licensed. As you know, this is no longer the case. There is still a Morse Code requirement in Thailand, but not in the US. So in the US, people now learn Morse Code because it interests them and they want to learn how to use it, not because they want to pass a test. That is a good thing!

I'm glad he wrote the article, because you're now considering whether it might help you to learn the code. But I don't like the fact that early in the article he makes a big point about how hard it was for him to learn. I don't accept that as a given at all. I spent a summer practicing copying CW sent to me by my father on our back porch at night. My father had learned the code in Boy Scouts and he could easily send CW at 5 wpm or more. Before the end of the summer I could easily copy 5 wpm and was able to pass the test and I got my first ham license. All that practice was a lot of fun and not the least bit hard. So I like people who are just starting out to feel like it is going to be a fun thing to learn.

Now there are a million different approaches to learning the code and we've learned a lot about how to go about it since 1959. Most people in my generation learned it the wrong way back then. The battery powered code practice oscillator I used in those days had a listing of all the letters & numbers right on top of the device, with dots and dashes to the right of each character defining how to send that character. I learned the code that way, which made it a visual learning process. In school I had learned to memorize text on a page or in my notes and I could see that text on the page in my mind when I needed an answer on a test. I learned CW the same way.

That is the WRONG way to learn CW, which W6REC does not mention. It works okay up to 10 wpm or so, but above that it begins to break down. That's because you've learned to add a bunch of steps to what you hear to translate that sound into the visual image you've memorized. That takes time and it breaks down as you get above 10 wpm.

If you come across one of these charts or tables that defines the dots & dashes for each of the letters and numbers in Morse Code, don't even look at it. Don't let it poison your mind! Turn away and look somewhere else.

The correct way to learn the code is to learn the sounds of the characters and/or words. I had to completely relearn the code that way to get into the 15 wpm range or higher. That is, someone tells you he/she is going to send a letter A, you listen and hear that sound and you learn that that sound is A. There is no translating by way of some visual image in your mind. You just learn that that is the sound of an A. Period. Then you practice those sounds a lot.

The expert CW operators are my heroes. Their skill is amazing, but they got there by way of many hours of practice. Every year at Field Day, I would sit by the CW station and just listen to what was going on. My speed of copying went up the more I did it. Practice makes perfect, right?

If I were starting all over again, I would want to learn from real pros. By that I mean people who could easily converse with Morse Code at 25 wpm or faster. There's actually a group of people with those skills on the Internet called CWops. And they have something they call CW Academy where they teach people this level of skill, for free. They've been doing it for about ten years.

I recommend that you poke around their website, read their newsletters and see what you think. I think you would be in good hands learning the code from them. They are the pros. And W6REC may well be one of them. But I think they have developed a system for teaching CW that really works. No promises, because I haven't tried it myself, but they really look legit to me.