I spent a lot of the years I was inactive as a ham riding a bicycle, racking up close to 1,000 miles every year. I did many of those miles with the Ann Arbor Bicycle Touring Society (AABTS). On a typical AABTS ride, you’ll find riders at all levels: speedsters, plodders, and all those in-between. You often hear the slower riders wondering, “Why do those guys ride so fast, anyway? What’s their hurry”? The answer always given is “We ride fast because we can.”
Now, I was never a true “A” rider, but at one point, I was just good enough to hang with the big boys for a little while, anyway, and I can understand that answer. It’s a real rush when your muscles mesh with your machine and you find yourself flying along at 20+ miles per hour in a paceline.
What does this have to do with ham radio? Well, working CW is kind of the same thing. First of all those that don’t work CW are always wondering why we even bother. In the bike world, the answer is, “Because it’s fun.” It’s the same with CW. We use Morse code it because it’s fun.
Once you get past that, the next thing some CW ops hear is, “What’s the sense in operating so fast?” To that, the only answer is, “We do it because we can.” Just as it makes little sense to ride a bicycle at 20+ miles per hour, there aren’t that many good reasons to operate CW at 20+ words per minute, but the QRQ CW ops do it because they can.
Just as I don’t pretend to have been an “A” bike rider, I don’t pretend to be a QRQ CW operator. At best, I’m currently running at 25 wpm.
I do have flashes, though, of what it must be like to go really fast. Sometimes, I’ll tune into a QSO proceeding at perhaps 30 words per minute, and I’ll actually be able to copy a sentence or two of it. Maybe I’ll even get most of a transmission. I feel like I’m actually copying words and not characters. When I can do that, I get the same kind of rush that I get when I’m on the back of a fast paceline.
Even though I never quite made it as an A rider, I still have hopes of making it as a QRQ CW operator. Becoming an A rider means spending a lot of time on the bike. Becoming a QRQ CW operator means spending a lot of time wearing headphones and banging on a paddle. The question is whether or not I have the time or the desire to it.