Get on Air
There are so many ways to get on the air with CW. From POTA and SOTA to weekly contests at slow, medium, and high speeds. Here are some of my favorites.
- Straight Key Century Club. I love SKCC. It's a kind, welcoming group who want to take the time to get a QSO with you, regardless of your skill. For a group focused on 'old' manual technologies, their SKED page, logger, and skimmer make it easy to find and make contacts. It's a large and active organization, so you can probably do nearly any kind of operating you want. Like contests? There are 2 hour sprints, weekend sprints, and an annual QSO party! Like slow speed operating? Try the slow speed saunter each month! Want to chase awards? There are so many to choose. Like I said, in my experience, it's a great bunch of operators who want to have QSOs with you, so it's a great place to get on the air.
- The Top 9 Activity is another operating opportunity I really like. It's not one I've been as active with as SKCC, but it's one I want to be more involved with going forward. It's basically just encouragement to do longer QSOs in certain portions of the band. It's hard to do a random ragchew, but it's a lot of fun (to me). I'd like to keep working on this one.
Get Better
You get better at a skill like CW through practice, though there are of course better and worse ways to practice! You can practice on the air in QSOs or off the air through study. I've covered getting on the air, so here I'll list some resources for practice.
- Take a course. I took, and loved, a CW Innovations course. But you could take courses through LICW or CWOps. There might be other courses out there, too. It's nice to learn with folks, and it's nice to learn how to learn. It's easy to get stuck in your CW learning journey, and a class can help bump you out of that.
- Use online resources. You can practice online using tools like morsecode.world, LCWO, or morsewalker.com.
- Listen to podcasts. I've spent a ton of time listening to the Morse Ninja practice podcasts at various speeds. And I recently started listening to the Foundations of Amateur Radio podcast in CW (it's a fixed 25wpm, though).
- Watch YouTube videos. There are so many folks putting their contest operations and POTA/SOTA activations on YouTube. Some decode for you, but when I watch, I prefer the ones that let me struggle it out. I tend to not learn super-well this way, so I don't have a ton to say about specifics here. But I know some people swear by these!
Get Curious
There is so much interesting stuff going on in the world of CW. Here are some things I'm curious about.
- QRP operation. I have a QRP CW rig (an old Elecraft K1), but other than a few POTA activations, I haven't used it much. Since I'm moving in the early part of 2025, I packed up my main shack radio (a Kenwood TS-590SG) and am using the K1 exclusively for a bit. I've joined the North American QRP CW Club and want to get a bit more involved there.
- Contesting. It's not the right time of life for me to get seriously into contesting, but I think it would be fun to do a bit more than I have to date.
- Computer-aided CW. I only send by hand, but I think it would be cool to be able to use my computer for some of the faster contests. I think this would help me feel more comfortable in some of the faster contest environments (even something like the Medium Speed Test on Mondays).
- QRSS. This is very different from all the other CW operating I've done to date, but I think it's really, really cool, and I hope to be in a position to create a QRSS setup at some point in the future.
Get Started
If you don't know CW, getting started can feel daunting. Hopefully it's exciting, too! There are a ton of resources for getting started, and I'm sure as many different takes on how to actually learn CW.
From my experience, the basic process is this:
- Learn the letters
- Start learning to copy words
- Get on the air
See the other sections on this page for more information about getting on the air and improving your skills. But if you are just starting out, here are a few resources you might like for learning the letters:
- LCWO. This site does a great job walking you through learning the letters. My two cents: set your character speed high (30+), your effective speed low (5?), and once you are getting 75% or so on a lesson, move on. This is a good way to go if you like to learn on your own.
- Long Island CW Club. I haven't done any of their stuff, but folks love them, and they seem to have thought about learning CW a lot. If a drop-in, online class is your thing, this seems like a great way to go!
- CW Academy Beginner Course. This is another one I haven't taken, but it also gets high marks from those who have. It seems like a good option if you want to learn with others but in a more structured, focused, committed group. Where LICW classes are drop-in, CWOps classes are a fairly serious 8 week commitment.