I agree to some points on that one. Several of my ham friends use CW as the 'fun' part of the hobby, and these guys will keep doing so. I see the CW requirement may go away, but will it really lessen the amount of CW traffic? I talked this over with alot of people at ham-com, and some of them said that they did learn CW in order to move to general, but do not prefer it, rather they are interested in digital or SSTV, or (ugh) SSB.. Others said that once they tried it, they really like it.
One elderly friend of mine can't pound the brass any more, so he uses his computer to transmit, and his ears to receive. (he's also one of the 'crabby old guys' that says "CW keeps the riff raff out") But I have alot of respect for him, so I don't argue the point. When I pick up some SSB, the discussion is seldom technical, but like someone mentioned, it's about the dog, the car, the weather, etc. When I pick UP AM, it's more technical, usually about the rig, changes to the rig, so and so added a choke here or there in the modulator, what's the plate voltage on the 250TH, etc. I like the experimentation, the merging of a high power, low distortion audio amplifier with an efficient RF amplifier. I have a spare Altec 1570B audio power amplifier running two 811's, in a class-B circuit. I think I can maybe apply this to my Link 250UFS tranciever and do some 6M AM. I can say that CW and AM seem to go well together, if you have a notch filter or a variable width IF. You can either 'notch in' the CW signal that is close to a sideband of the AM signal, or 'notch out'/move your passband away from the nearby CW signal to where you are listening mostly to one of the AM sidebands. I have sliced many AM signals this way on ye olde R390, using an old spectrum analyzer hooked to the IF out, to elimiate a nearby stronger signal. I know this does not always work, but I threw it out there anyway. Most of my CW-friends use 40 and 20M. I think CW is a mode that will always be here, just like AM and classical RTTY. It might become a mode which is more for pleasure, which is definitely where AM and the ye olde ASR-33's are now, but its usefulness will never be overshadowed in difficult conditions. I would like to see a heads up comparison of something like PSK31 and CW during poor conditions, just to see.
