The other night I worked Jock, N1JI on 40m. At one point, he sent, “QRX 1 BABY CRYING.” Baby crying? As it turned out, he was holding his baby son while he was in QSO with me.
How cool is that? I wonder if this experience will influence his son to become a ham (and hopefully a CW operator)? That would make Frank II a third-generation ham as Jock’s father, Frank, K1FLI is also a ham.
LOTW renewal
I’ve blogged before about the difficulties I had registering with the ARRL’s Logbook of the World (LOTW). That’s why when I received an e-mail from the ARRL saying that I had to renew my certificate, I got a little anxious.
Well, I’m happy to report that renewing my certificate was fairly painless. I simply followed the renewal instructions and the next day I got the new certficate by e-mail. After upgrading to the latest version of TQSL, I installed the certificate and all’s well with the QSLing world.
My latest stats include:
- 17,131 QSOs
- 4,233 QSLs
- 144 total DXCC entities confirmed, including 142 on CW
- All 50 states confirmed, including 49 on 40m, 46 on 30m, and 45 on 20m.
Working on my keying
So, despite being the “CW Geek,” and a big proponent of using paddles, I haven’t really been sending all the characters iambically. Particularly, those that start and end with a dit, such as R (di-dah-dit), L (di-dah-di-dit), and F (di-di-dah-dit). Those characters are more difficult to send because you have to make the dah contact while the dit is being sent.
About a month ago, I decided I’m just going to do it, though. I started with the letters C and R. Learning to send these two characters was easier than I thought. I’m now sending most Cs iambically, and I can send R without error most times.
The big thing is making an effort to send these characters iambically. My “muscle memory” is to send these characters as if I was using a single-lever paddle, not a dual lever. I have to really think about it, or I send the characters non-iambically. In the end, I’m not sure it’s really worth the effort, but I’m going to plug away at it.
UPDATE 11/2/15
I just received an e-mail from a reader who says:
You lost me. Even my wife the Eng Lit major and walking dictionary, doesn’t know what you are talking about. Please restate using something other than iambically.
I apologize if I lost you, too, but The reason his English Lit major wife couldn’t decode (pun intended) what I wrote is because iambic keying is an amateur radio term, not an English Lit term, although they are loosely connected. I don’t want to use another term because this is the term that amateur radio operators use.
If you’re an amateur radio operator, you need learn how we use this term in amateur radio. To see what I mean by iambic keying, have a look at the YouTube video below:
Dave, N8SBE says
The important thing to remember about renewing LOTW certificates is to do so before the old one expires. Otherwise, you will have to re-apply all over again. In the IT world of signed certificates, you must use the older unexpired certificate to sign the new certificate, and that is how LOTW is designed to operate (using a certificate chain that goes back to your original ‘root’ certificate that was issued by ARRL).