## Learning to Send.

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Start sending practice only after you have the correct sound and rythm of the characters embedded in your mind using Teach. If at all possible, visit the shack of an expert, and closely watch what he or she does with the key.

You'll need an audio oscillator to monitor your keying. There are many types. Two simple ones I recommend are shown in the figure below.
Circuit (a) is a blocking oscillator, which runs even with junk-box transistors, powered by a single torch cell. The tone is sharp and horrible, but it's simple. The 220 kohm potentiometer adjusts the frequency.

Circuit (b) uses 2 gates of a quad 74C00 CMOS NAND chip in a square-wave oscillator, driving a speaker or phones through an npn transistor. The pin connections are correct for this chip, but other CMOS NAND chips are different. Ground pins 1,2,4 and 5 (the other inputs) to reduce current drain. Change the 68 kohm resistor to change the frequency, and adjust the volume with the 1 kohm potentiometer.

### Morse Keys

You can take the test sending with a bug or electronic keyer, but these are harder to master, though they require less movement and effort. Unless you have some disability that restricts your hand mobility, stick to the standard, up-and-down, "pump handle" type.

Ham radio suppliers still sell morse keys, and so does Dick Smith Electronics. But the cheap DSE key is too flimsy for serious use. Ask around at the local NZART Branch, and see if a local will sell or lend you one. Go for a large, solid, heavy model. Most ZL Hams prefer the rounded "European" knob - not the flat or slightly dished "American" knob. Some have replaced a knob not to their taste with a replacement pot-lid knob from the local hardware store.
Check out the key before using it! Clean the contacts by pulling a piece of paper through them while pressing firmly - don't use a points file! Oil the bearings if they look cruddy, and adjust them if possible to take out any sideways movement. I recommend starting with a gap of about 1 mm, and spring tension adjusted so the key closes with the weight of 2 D cells placed on the knob. (You may want to change these settings to something "more comfortable" after you gain experience). If the start and finish of elements sounds "ragged", try connecting about 0.1 uF across the key contacts to zap keybounce transients.
Secure the key firmly near the table edge . Some operators use bluetack or plasticine at each edge of the bottom, or even a G cramp or velcro. It must not walk around! Adjust your chair height such that your sending arm is parallel to the floor , and not touching the table . Grasp the key loosely with two fingers atop the knob, thumb at the side or underneath.
Form dots and dashes by "pumping the wrist", not by pressing with the fingers! The wrist moves up and down about 1 - 2 cm, with the elbow stationary. The arm must be relaxed. Tense muscles will tire you, cause RSI or "glass arm" and lead to later problems. Relax.
To get the relative lengths of dits and dahs correct, start off with this exercise: Relax: Send the continous element stream
di di di di dah dah di di di di dah dah .....
Tap your foot regularly on the accented (underlined) symbols. The "4 dit" and "2 dah" segements should take exactly the same time. (Although the dit:dah ratio is 1:3, when the "dot-space" separator is included the ratio becomes 1:2.)
Relax! Do not try to send fast! Almost everyone does, and the tendency is to speed up during practice. Listen periodically to TEACH to hear again what "5 wpm sounds like". You'll find this speed quite easy.

However, you can send faster for the test if you wish, and many people actually find this easier, because judging the long spaces implicit in Farnsworth Morse is difficult. I can't do it accurately either. Try listening to 12 wpm Morse sent with a Farnsworth speed of 14 wpm, and model your sending on that. This will also be closer to what you'll end up sending on the air. But remember, you only have to send at an overall speed of 5 wpm for the test!
Spaces! Leave plenty of space between letters, and even more between words! Almost everybody tends to run things together. This is the most common and horrible fault you'll hear on the air!

## Evaluating your Sending.

Comment: Almost everybody I have tested in the last 5 years has had some sort of problem with their grip or action which will later cause fatigue, poor character formation, maybe RSI - which the old-timers called "glass arm". Nothing beats an "eyeball" demonstration by an expert and a correction of possible faults before you develop bad habits!

Here are several recommendations:

- Find an active CW operator. If at all possible, visit one, or invite one around so he or she can demonstrate the grip and action, and check yours. If this is impossible, and you have VHF/UHF voice capability, you can ask an expert to listen to you on a simplex channel. Send some text with your audio oscillator close to the microphone, and ask for comments.

- Start TEACH sending one of the supplied texts. Read the text on the screen, and send along with the computer. If you have a good ear, you'll be able to hear the difference between the "perfect" morse and your own. (This is much harder than it sounds! Even experienced operators have difficulty!

- My original DOS teaching software, which I still distribute (contact me by email, phone or letter), contains a program called MREAD. The instructions tell you how to connect a morse key to 2 pins of a COM (serial) port. Pressing the key sounds an audio monitor tone through the computer speaker (not the soundcard) and the computer attempts to decode the morse you send, and prints it to the screen. It doesn't expect perfect sending, and is comfortable with "reasonable" morse. If it can read you, you'll certainly pass the sending test. Unfortunately, some later versions of Windows, even though they are able to bring up a "DOS box", seem unable to connect the COM port to the program, even though the program appears to run.

- The DOS software also contains a program "DK", for "Doctor". You send a single word. The computer displays an oscilloscope picture of your morse, gives you some statistics about it, and allocates you a mark out of 100. You'll rapidly see your faults, and will be able to correct them. Again, the DOS box in later versions of Windows is sometime unable to find the COM port and key.

- Sergei, UA9SOV, distributes an excellent shareware Windows program called "CWget". Download it from

  http://www.dxsoft.com/index.html

  CWget reads audio morse through the soundcard, and displays the text on the screen. You'll probably need to pass your oscillator waveform through an attenuator (try a 10:1 voltage divider of 1 kohm and 100 ohm) before applying it to the soundcard input. This is the best morse reading program I know.

A good exercise: Fire up CWget or MREAD, and ensure it's decoding OK. Then, without looking at the screen, send several repetitions of
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
Check to see what the computer read. If you see incorrect letters, practise them! If you can't see what's wrong, run up program DK and look critically at these letters. You'll soon see the trouble.

Remember! Nothing beats an "eyeball" evaluation by an experienced operator!
If all else fails, send me a cassette tape of your sending for a diagnostic check. I'll send it back with comments and a recorded comment.

## Calibrating Electronic Keyers:

Electronic keyers send elements automatically. A "paddle" is used, with two horizontally-operated levers. Conventionally, the thumb (left) lever sends a continuous stream of dits, the forefinger (right) lever sends a continuous stream of dahs. Most modern keyers also implement iambic operation, where closing both paddles sends an alternating sequence of dits and dahs. Elements are guaranteed to be in the correct 1:3 ratio, separated with a correct ditspace.

All keyers vary the sending speed by changing the frequency of a clock, either by front-panel control, or, in microprocessor-controlled units, by commands from the paddle itself.

The best way to check the speed, or to calibrate that of an unknown keyer, is to digitize the audio of a continuous dit-stream with a software package such as GoldWave, and observe the resulting waveform. Find the average time, T, taken to send one dit and the following dit-space. The speed S, in WPM is then

S = 2400/T

Where T is measured in milliseconds. That is, if a dot plus the following dotspace take 100 ms, the character speed is 24 wpm.

A less accurate but more convenient method is to send a stream of dits of known speed, and at the same time send dits from the keyer. Then adjust the keyer's speed control until both sound at exactly the same rate. Some people, especially those with musical training, can do this more easily than others. You will hear "beats" near the correct setting, as the sounds slowly move in and out of synchronism.

To send such a calibrated dit-stream using Teach, click on "Advanced" in the top tool-bar, then "Dits". A text of 10 "@" characters will be loaded into the text box, which can then be sent by clicking the "Send Text" button. "@" is coded as a special character, a stream of 20 dits with no following character-space. Hence this character string sends 200 dits at whatever speed is set. This will take 40 seconds at 12 wpm. This is normally enough to tune the speed, but the operation can be repeated by clicking "Send Text" again.

The default Farnsworth speed is set at 14 wpm. To set keyer speeds below this, shift the Farnsworth speed bar at 12 (lowest setting). However, I recommend that you never use characters speeds less than 14 wpm for reasons covered earlier. If you want to send slower than this, put longer spaces between your characters and words.

If you want to construct an electronic keyer, I strongly recommend the "K9" kitset developed and distributed by Steve, K1EL. I use this keyer whenever I operate portable. Check out his website at

http://members.aol.com/k1el/

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