ARROW Communications Association

I was recently looking through an old box of projects I built for a specific capacitor I knew I put into *something* I made and I ran across my Yaesu FT-817. I got licensed as a Tech in 2001 but I had so much to do that I never got around to learning CW and that's the real reason I wanted to get into amateur radio in the first place.

Anyways, I saw the radio and decided to give CW another shot. I took and passed element 3 on August 10th and after downloading the G4FON software I'm up to about 25 letters/numbers/punctuation marks at a speed of 15/5. I found that I had been trying to learn at about a speed of 20/15 and I think that was a big part of my frustration (I could'nt keep up when writing the letters) and slow learning. I do find that 20 WPM creates an easier rhythm for each letter, 15 WPM just feels too much like individual dits and dahs. At a 5 WPM spacing I have trouble differentiating when a new word starts because there is so much space between letters anyways, but I think that in a real QSO it will be fine since it will be real words and not just random letter groups.