Last night, I worked Jack, W4TJE. He’s a great operator, and I always enjoy chatting with him. Later that evening, I got the following email:
Dan,
You mention on your QRZ.Com page how working Field Day in 2002 got you back into amateur radio. I have a similar story here. I’ve always been active, but was never much of a CW op. I just didn’t get it, never saw the attraction. But, at a Field Day around that same time, I watched an old WWII era ham, now SK, working CW at what sounded like machine gun speed, all while sipping coffee and with a cigarette dangling off his lips, and cracking jokes with us while he did it.
I asked him later how he did it, and he looked puzzled at first, then asked me how I did it. After telling him about my CW struggles, he told me that if I could ever trust myself to put the pencil down, and copy in my head instead, it would be a lot more fun. That one conversation set me on the path to becoming a better CW operator.
73 Jack W4TJE
I never really thought about head copy in this way, but I think it’s true. You have to trust yourself to be able to do it. I think that’s true about a lot of things in life, not just CW. Barring any physical impairment, you gotta trust that you’ll be able to tackle a task in order to actually do it. As Yogi Berra is purported to have said, “Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical.”
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