In response to my post on American Morse, a ham e-mailed me:
Interesting. With all you’ve written on ham radio, with all you seem to be involved in, and with all the help you’ve given me over the last several months, I expected you were a CW pro.
Now that I’ve passed Tech, and will be taking (and passing) my General exam in a little over a week, I, too, have decided to learn code. In fact, I bought a couple of keyer kits to “build my own” and resurrect the fun I had as a kid who built all sorts of Heathkits.
Nonetheless, I’m not sure whether I want to learn Morse, or just be able to “use it.” By the latter I mean there is, as you know, a bunch of hardware and software that will translate received Morse into text, and convert keyboard-entered text into sendable CW. So far my main stumbling block is that most of the devices and programs require a PC with a serial port, and I’m a die-hard Mac user.
Operating CW is about more than just communicating with Morse Code, though. Here’s how I replied:
Take it from me, you really want to learn code and not just be able to use it with computer decoders. There are several reasons for this.
The first is that even the best CW decoders aren’t very good when the signal being received is weak or when the operator on the other end isn’t sending perfect code. And even when the signal is strong, the character spacing has to be just so, or the decoding program will insert spaces between letters.
The second reason that you want to learn it rather than just use it is that it’s just more fun. If you’re going to use a computer to send and receive code, you might as well skip CW and operate PSK31 or one of the other digital modes. Seriously. For me, one of the real joys of working CW is using and developing the skill.