Bill...
Good advice. You may be amused to hear MY version of "reading some
printed material" while listening for phrases. I spent 15 months in
"west" Germany (before the re-unification) as a guest of their gov't,
and took along my Kenwood TS-520 and a fold-up vertical. All of my
operation was done with the vertical clamped to the apartment balcony
and IN CW. With this set-up most of the stations I worked were German or
German-speaking, and learning to "morse" in German, both sending and
receiving, did absolute wonders for my speed.
I have always been a CW type (until recently, when PSK got my
attention), and had at that time a 35 wpm certificate from the ARRL, but
by the time I got back to the states, I could copy upwards of 65-70 wpm
in my head. I sent with a keyboard and a buffer, as i am a fast typist,
but it was the copying /in the head and not on paper with a pencil/ that
did all this for me. I figure if one uses a stick and the signal corps
letter system that 35 wpm is about the upper limit for hard copy. I
never tried to copy with a mill, but I type easily 100 wpm -- the best
high school course I ever took! -- so there was no problem keeping the
buffer full. It was the listening/copying that transformed my ability to
converse in CW.
The brain's ability to do this sort of thing is quite amazing...I
always felt like it was a tape unrolling inside my head...and your
comment about 45 wpm is certainly true. Due to a long lay-off, my CW
speed has slackened a bit, but I still have the experience of "words and
phrases popping into my head" rather than letter by laborious letter.
I thought that the FCC's deletion of the CW requirement was a
seriously retrograde step for ham radio. CW is certainly one of the
premium weak-signal modes available to the non-computerized part of the
world. I never learned to copy RTTY in my head, and the same applies to
BPSK31. I am not sure if /anyone/ can copy e.g. Olivia 16/500 by ear,
even though it sounds "nice." Maybe Mozart?
73
John Ragle -- W1ZI
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