Two Months Into CW - The Moment It Finally Clicked

If you read my post from last month about my first month of learning CW, you know I was pretty frustrated. I was drilling away with the Koch method using the trainer software every single morning before work, usually 15 or 20 minutes, sometimes longer on weekends. I was stuck around 10 words per minute and the characters just weren't sticking the way I wanted them to. I'd hear a V and think "dit dit dit dah" and by the time I'd consciously worked through that in my head, I'd already missed the next two characters. It was exhausting.

My Elmer, a guy I met at our local club's license exam session back when I was studying for my General, kept telling me to stop trying to decode the dits and dahs and just let my brain hear the whole character as a sound. He said it the same way every time we talked about it: "Stop counting. Just listen." I heard him. I understood the concept. I just couldn't make my brain do it.

Then about three weeks ago on a Tuesday morning, I was copying random code groups with the trainer set to 15 wpm character speed and about 10 wpm effective speed — the Farnsworth method spacing — and something was different. I wasn't thinking about the dashes and dots in the letter K. I just... heard K. Same with R. Same with the number 5. I didn't realize what was happening until I looked down at my paper and noticed I'd been copying pretty cleanly for maybe two minutes straight without really trying.

I actually stopped the trainer and just sat there for a second. Then I started it back up because I was afraid to lose whatever had just happened.

It didn't all suddenly become easy after that. Let me be real clear about that. There are still characters that trip me up consistently. Q is one. Y is another. Anything with a bunch of dahs tends to blur together when I'm tired. But something fundamental had shifted. The copying felt less like translating a foreign language and more like just listening. Even a little bit.

I went down to the shack that evening and tuned around 40 meters in the low end where the CW activity is and just listened for a while. I've been doing that regularly actually — just tuning around without trying to copy anything specific, just getting comfortable with the sound of actual on-air CW rather than the clean perfect tones of a software trainer. Real radio CW is messy. There's QRM, there's guys whose timing isn't perfect, there's fading. The trainer didn't really prepare me for that part.

I tried copying a few QSOs and I could get maybe 60 or 70 percent of it on a good signal. Not enough to actually respond to anything, but enough that I felt like I wasn't completely lost. That's genuinely progress from a month ago when I could barely pull out callsigns.

The thing I wish someone had told me earlier — and maybe they did and I just needed to experience it myself — is that the frustration plateau is real and it lasts longer than you want it to. I hit a stretch of about two and a half weeks in week six and seven where I felt like I was actively getting worse. My accuracy was dropping, I was second-guessing characters I had previously nailed, and I was starting to wonder if I was one of those people who just doesn't have the brain for this. My Elmer basically told me that's normal and to just keep going, which is the kind of advice that's both completely right and also kind of annoying to hear when you're in the middle of it.

I've also started supplementing the trainer with the LCWO website, which has some different exercise formats that help break things up. The callsign copying practice there has been particularly useful because callsigns are obviously what I'll be dealing with the most on the air. You get a feel for the rhythm of a typical ham callsign pretty quickly. There's also a feature where you can slow down specific characters that are giving you trouble and drill those individually, which helped me a lot with F and L, which I kept mixing up for an embarrassing amount of time.

One thing I've started doing on weekends when I have more time is copying ARRL code practice transmissions on . They broadcast CW practice at various speeds on a regular schedule and they publish the text afterward so you can check your copy. There's something about copying real transmitted signals with actual propagation effects that the software trainer doesn't give you. Plus it just feels more like ham radio, which helps with motivation when you're grinding through drills.

I set myself a goal of making my first actual CW QSO by the end of this month. That's about two and a half weeks away. I'm nervous about it but I've been practicing a simple exchange — RST, name, QTH — and I think I can get through it if I find someone patient. There are operators out there who specifically look for beginners on certain frequencies and will slow way down. I've been told that QRS (please send slower) is one of the most important things to know how to send, which honestly cracked me up because of course that's critical information.

My Elmer suggested I try making contact during a slower part of the day when experienced operators are more likely to be hunting for any contact and won't mind taking it slow. He also reminded me that I don't have to copy everything perfectly to have a valid QSO. People have been making CW contacts with partial copy for as long as CW has existed. The culture around it is actually pretty forgiving from what I understand.

I'll post an update after I finally pull the trigger on that first CW contact. If it goes anything like my first ever HF contact on voice did, it'll be simultaneously terrifying and one of the most satisfying things I've done in this hobby. And probably a lot shorter than I expect because I'll blank on something obvious and just sign off early out of panic.

That's kind of where I am at the two month mark. Still very much a beginner, still making mistakes, but starting to believe that this is actually going to work. If you're in month one and feeling like you're never going to get it — I hear you. I was you. Keep going.