Over on Mastodon.Radio the operator known as F1RUM decided to throw out a hashtag and invited people to keep him motivated on his journey to CW proficiency and enhance focus on their own journies.
I’m in!
The announcement brought people out of the woodwork to talk about their experience. As a result, my strategy has changed. In my practice to date, I was using additional spacing and, as I play more with it, it makes more sense to stop doing that. I’m kicking off the 100 days with 12 wpm character speed with 12 wpm effective speed. It’s a different experience. Keeping things moving makes sense. I haven’t tried it yet, but when I’m done getting through the character practice again, I will do the 10 wpm ARRL files just to see how I’m doing. I feel more and more that my transition from 7.5 wpm to 10 wpm was held up by the character spacing in my practice.
What really reset things was having someone say that an operator who is going at 12 wpm is not going to have a character speed of 20+ wpm. It’s going to be closer to 12/12. And THAT makes sense. Who is going to be going blazing fast with characters and move at almost half that speed in terms of effective wpm? No one, that’s who. The pace of communication is going to be as consistent as possible. As such, the aim should be fluency rather than speed right off the bat.
As of yesterday, I reset my Koch numbers and established 12/12 for my sessions. So far, I feel like I’m doing well. I have pretty solid character recognition at 20 wpm. This is becoming more and more an exercise of capturing the strings as they come. That requires a little buffer in my memory which will likely serve me well when I go from gibberish strings to things that actually mean something.
This is Day 2. I’m working on Koch lesson 7.
K M U R E S N A
Hitting 90% copy this morning over coffee and getting ready to move on. My hope is that after 100 days, my copy will be solid enough for a POTA activation.
The Goal is set.
