Lou,

You touched on the subject that is often highly debated in 
CW circles, especially when it comes to contests.

The dilemma is this:

Of course, the higher your speed, the more contacts you can 
make within a given amount of time. But that only holds true 
if you can find enough other stations who can match your 
speed.

For most of my operating this past week, I used my now 22 
year-old MFJ CW keyboard. Most of the time, I had it set at 
either 25 or 22 WPM.

If I hit a string of stations, maybe 6 or 7, who were 
sending faster than me, I would speed up to 30 WPM, and 
maybe once or twice to 35. (I'm not much good above that.) 
Every time I did that, my qso rate fell off because I was 
sending beyond the copy speed of the average station. When I 
dropped back to 25, the qso rate would increase.

I noticed little difference between the qso rate at 22 and 
25 WPM, but above 25, it became obvious very quickly.

I think what was probably happening was that a lot of people 
who are on average pretty good CW operators, but who are not 
big contest operators were trying to work us on CW. So, 
whenever I started to out run them, they either waited for 
me to slow down, or simply went away.

A few times, when not much was happening at any speed, I 
slowed to 15 WPM. While I didn't make a lot of contacts at 
that speed, I found that more people were matching my 
sending speed, and fewer were sending faster than me.

One other deduction from all that is that if you send fast 
enough, sooner or later somebody will, as it were, challenge 
you to a race.

Overall, I heard a lot of very good CW, and encountered more 
good operators than bad ones.


Mike Duke, K5XU
American Council of Blind Radio Amateurs



---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.
http://www.avast.com