Friday, July 10, 2015

CW Frustrations

The annoying thing about having my stroke is waiting for your morse code to come back up to a reasonable standard.

 At the moment reading morse is very difficult, the brain is just not working on all cylinders which is most annoying. Imagine that you know a language fluently, but you have now lost the ability to interpret it? That's what has happened to me with the morse, I used to be able to work eighteen words a minute no problem, but now I'm struggling to hit ten! 

The problem is I can't translate the letters fast enough I track one letter and second later I've written it down but by that time the sender has sent three more letters! Then you get very annoyed and you don't concentrate so you lose the conversation.

 It's getting better slowly and in time I'll be fine but very frustrating it's taking so long but it's a good judge of where you are in the recovery process. Mentally I'm still struggling but physically I'm doing well, I cycled my first ten miler the other day which shows the strength is coming back, hopefully I will be doing a twenty miler in the near future. 

I've gone berserk with new morse keys, I got a lovely old Admiralty NATO key and I have ordered a Spark hand key from Bengali but it won't be ready until mid July, but I can wait I'm not exactly busy at the moment! Most days I practise on the computer listening to G4FON or "Just Learn Morse Code" I generally do about 15/20 minutes a day to keep me in check for when the fog finally clears from the head.

The radios are all performing as they should but conditions have not been that good, mostly European stations but it's enough to keep me in absorbed with the hobby. Antenna wise I'm playing about and doing the usual running repairs to keep me occupied I think I am going to have to start planning another antenna build to keep the brain active, any suggestions? I quite fancy something for 160m but keeping it fairly small and low key.