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2022 Q1 update
2 April 2022 | by
It's hard to believe that we are 3 months into 2022, winter should soon be on its way out and the warm summer breezes will soon be greeting us. I ended 2021 with a year in review posthttps://ve3wdm.blogspot.com/2021/12/looking-back-and-looking-ahead.html. In this post, my 2021 goals were to get less FT8 contact and more CW contacts. Not that I have an issue with FT8 but I did find I was paying way too much attention to this mode and my CW skills suffered. The plan was to shore up my CW skills, get into more CW contests and increase my CW contacts.
As far as the past three months go my CW contest copying skill has gone from an average of 22 wpm to 36 wpm and 38 with some repeats. This was accomplished with daily practice of about 30-50 mins. Taking part in weekly CWops mini-contests on Wednesdays. In these contests I operate search and pounce as at this point calling CQ in this fast-paced contest is not in the cards as of yet. On Friday evenings K1USN radio club runs a slow-speed CW contest or SST as they call it. It is a slow speed contest but practice is practice and in this contest, I hold a frequency and call CQ SST for contacts.
I am very pleased with the first 3 months of 2022, my CW contacts almost match the number for all of 2021! I am very happy with my increase in CW copying and my move away from FT8 and more CW. In the chart above from Club log it does show for 2022 a certain percentage for phone operation. Well, I don't have a mic in the shack and I am figuring my logging program logs the occasional QSO as SSB. It has done this in the past and this year I may not have caught this before uploading a log.
2 Responses to “2022 Q1 update”
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Mike,
Good update. I’m on your same path, but have not yet hit the “daily” practice. A few times each week, but pushing towards daily.
I also dip in to the CWTs on Wednesdays as S&P and it pushes my level, but that is a good thing.
I’m also participating in the SSTs (S&P) on Fridays & Sundays and thoroughly enjoy those events.
I’ll dabble into FTxx, but only for testing a that mode with a logging APP I’m on the Alpha Support team for.
73 – ki5io, Nolan K.
Good afternoon Nolan and very nice to hear from you, yes the daily practice at times may not happen at this end as life sometimes gets in the way. Other times I find that I start the session and things are just not clicking. Instead of getting frustrated I just stop and come back another time during the day. Other times I have to remember that I as everyone else will come to a wall and just not seem to be improving. This is common and I just keep plowing on and in time I get past it.
In the SST I generally sit and call CQ but maybe I will move on to S&P to see how that works out.
Have a great Sunday and thanks for stopping by and all the best with the CW practice.
73,
Mike
VE9KK