Over the past week, I’ve had a couple of odd QSOs. The first was with a guy who I almost think is stalking me. He has a tendency to call me right after I’ve completed a contact with another station. Usually, I kind of sigh every time I hear his call because he’s very hard to copy.
What makes him hard to copy is that he slurs some characters together, while actually separating the dits and dahs in other characters. For example, instead of sending “WELL,” he’ll send what sounds like “PLL.” When sending a “G,” he’ll often send “ME.”
Anyway, the other night, his signal was fading in and out, and at one point, I lost him. So, I moved down the band a bit and called CQ. He heard my call and called me again, so I decided to give it another try even thoughI had a feeling that he’d fade out again. Instead of picking up where we left off, though, he gave me an earful for leaving him in the lurch on the other frequency—even after I tried explaining that I had lost him. Sheesh.
My point here is don’t make it unpleasant for other stations to work you. Try to send as well as you can, and be courteous when you lose a contact. Poor behavior just turns people off.
Don’t be a macho CW operator
One of the “rules” of operating CW is to not send faster than you can copy. Unfortunately, this happens at higher speeds as well as at lower ones. The other night I heard a guy calling CQ at about 25 wpm, and I replied at that speed. After my first transmission, I could tell, however, that the other guy, while his sending was pretty good, just wasn’t copying fast enough. I surmised this because he didn’t really reply to me, but instead, went off in a different directions. I guess he figured this out, too. Instead of asking me to slow down, he signed off on his third transmission.
The point here is don’t be too “macho” when it comes to Morse Code. If you’re not copying enough, ask the other operator to slow down (QRS). In this case, I would have happily done so, and we probably would have had a nice conversation.
DXCC update
As a result of working several of the recent African DXpeditions, including D60AE (Comoros), 5V7RU (Togo), and J28MD (Djibouti), I’m now at 167 DXCC entities worked. My next goal is 200. Maybe I’ll get lucky and reach this by the end of this sunspot cycle.
Frederick Schebor/K8NGW says
There’s nothing that throws me off my CW game more than improper spacing. Generally, if I cannot decode their callsign in 3 or 4 tries ( there has to be a call district number in there someplace :-) ), I’ll reply with a SRI QRN and move on. While that’s easy for me to do, that doesn’t help them, and if they’re shunned by other CW operators too many times, they may give up on CW entirely and we all loose. I wrestle with how to correct them. If the conditions are good, should I try to correct them on air i.e. PSE SPACE UR CHARS or should I look them up on-line (assuming I can get any other identifying information) and start an e-mail dialog?
Alan W2AEW says
I think I know exactly who you’re talking about (the op with the very poor spacing). I’ve heard him quite a bit on 40m and even worked him a few times, once I could figure out his unique format.