I love CW, I am also rather crap at CW, but now and again i like to have a go just to see what happens, sometimes its good, sometimes its bad. This story is the latter HAHA.
Something i do now and again when bored, it drop the the bottom of the band and hit the auto keyer on the radio and just leave it call CQ for 10mins. Bottom parts of the bands are often dead, conditions have not been all that good for a while for anything other than FT8. But with the sun spots and solar flairs, other modes are looking up.
So last night after getting bored with FT8 I dropped down to CW on 15m tuned around and heard 1 station in the UK calling CQ, i worked him and then found a frequency to park on and call CQ. After 10mins of calling I was just about to call it a night and then out the blue someone came back to my call.
I was not prepared for this, no time time to pray to god, i was on my own. So, i copied the call quite ok, UA3DEQ, entered that into my log and proceeded to send him a report. This is where things went really really wrong.
I was making mistakes and making corrections and worst of all, he kept sending back NO NO NO UA3DEQ. This morning, in a moment of clarity realized that I was not sending Q dah dah di dah, I was sending L dah di dah dah. HAHAHA what a moron. I did send Igor an email and explained my predicament and he seemed understanding. I really need to work on my CW skills a lot more. With the sunspots improving and moving into the new solar cycle, I am going to have to spend a lot more time doing CW and much less time doing FT8.
I did get there in the end and sent Q a few times, survival, that was my great victory.
