Learning Morse Code for Amateur Radio: From CW Course to 100 DXCC Entities

When I started my amateur radio classes in 2022 and started to hang out with fellow radio operators, it did not take long before I heard people talk about using telegraphy with Morse code to communicate via amateur radio. At first I wondered, why would people invest a substantial amount of time learning to send and decode Morse signals without any aid of technical devices?

In fact, there are several reasons why people still use this first of all modes. One reason is that apparently the signal to noise ratio is higher when compared to a voice signal in single sideband (SSB). That means your signal can reach stations further away when sent with the same power using Morse code. Quite a good reason. Secondly, the mode is very flexible. You can have very short contest style QSOs¹ but also use it for conversational contacts.

The Course

There are even more reasons to learn and use it, so I was interested in learning CW² and participated in my local club’s CW course in 2024. The teacher was Edmund Ramm, DJ6UX, a very good operator with many years of operation as well as teaching practice. He has taught many operators over the years and his course evolved from in person to online in the recent years.

We used Mumble³ to receive and send the code along with voice over the internet. We would meet every Friday evening online for two hours and receive groups of five characters out of the already learned characters. We had to copy them down to paper and read them back. If we made a mistake we would get the same group of five characters sent again until we got it right. If the group was correct we would receive an `r` and the next student continued with the next group of five.

Every week there were new characters joining in, so we had to prepare by practicing daily for at least 15 minutes. This is the list of new characters in each week:

KW40: A,Q,S
KW41: T,2
KW42: C,O
KW43: D,5,/
KW44: I,R,9
KW45: G,X
KW46: F,4
KW47: repeat
KW48: N,U,7
KW49: H,,
KW50: =,.
KW51: B,K
KW52: P,3
KW01: M,Y
KW02: J,W,Z
KW03: 1,6
KW04: 8,?

Only once we had learned to receive all the signs we would start sending them. Every participant had a Junker Straight key and would send groups of 5 chars off of a sheet of paper to the others just like Eddi had done before. A pretty straightforward and effective method. But one that requires patience and persistence. Forget or neglect your practice in one week and you’ll have a hard time in the upcoming weeks. By learning in a group I felt a motivation that helped staying on board. And after some time I really wanted to make it and be able to use CW for radio contacts as I had already invested quite some time. In total, the course took a whole year. After we were done learning to send and receive we invested the remaining weeks to practice gaining more speed (up to 15wpm) and to acquire rudimentary head copy⁴ skills. A year might seem very long but all this takes a lot of time and practice.

The most challenging part for me was to allocate time for the course on Friday evenings. I was used to using that time to socialize, meet friends, go out and so on. It was very challenging to always stay strong and prioritize the cw course above all else. Some weeks I struggled. It felt like with every new character I had to also relearn the others to some degree. But slowly I gained more and more confidence. To me it felt most effective to spread the daily practice time across the day. Having short sessions in the morning, lunch time, and evening yielded better results than having one longer session.

Making First Contact

By the end of January 2025, a few others from the course and I tried to see if we could receive each others signals on the 2m band within Hamburg. What started as a test became my first Morse code radio contact, my first CW QSO. Many people have very vivid memory of their first CW QSO. To me I was a bit surprised but I knew what to expect so it felt more like the natural next step than a big revolution. It was not long before I started to also have my first QSOs on the short wave frequencies.

First Park Activation

Two weeks after that, I went for my first Parks on the Air⁵ activation in CW. 11 QSOs with a relative straightforward exchange, however when calling CQ you have to be able to directly respond to an unknown callsign which was quite challenging at first. You do not have to be perfect though, just get the first few letters and add a question mark and they’ll send it again for you. To me this first small POTA pileup in CW and handling it was the real tipping point. In the first QSO I knew the other operator and it was kind of like online but having natural static and fading on the signals on the short wave really was something totally new. From this moment on I just wanted to work more stations from various countries. The time invested had paid off.

Field Day

We continued with the course and during the first weekend in June a few operators from the local club and I participated in the IARU Region 1 field day in CW as DL0AT/P. It was quite hard for me to copy at the higher speeds. The weather was cold and rainy. We had issues with too much wind on our antenna. We organized in teams of two operators and took shifts of one to three hours each. It was good to have another operator listening next to me when I was having issues with the call signs. Together as a team we managed to get a few hundred QSOs into the log.

The Exam

In the summer on August 11th I took my official Morse code exam at the Bundesnetzagentur⁶. This is an optional added exam that officially certifies that the operator is able to send and receive Morse code at 12 words per minute. An operator that passed the exam would get a remark in his official license document. To officially prove that you are capable of Morse code operation is required to operate in some countries. However, I took that exam mainly just for me. Having an official verification to be a Morse code operator is a nice feeling.

Contest Operation from Home

In October that year I then worked my first contest from home. The Worked All Germany Contest wich yielded quite some QSOs despite the local noise at my station. For this I had to set up some contest logging software and configure the interface with my transceiver so the logbook could pull the frequency and band information from there. My strategy back then: I only worked search and pounce⁷ style. That way I had enough time to copy down the callsign of the station running on the frequency and also the sequential number they were giving out. That was challenging because of heavy QRM⁸ and the higher speeds I was not yet used to at the time.

Since then, I have activated many parks, taken part in multiple contests and had a lot of conversational contacts using Morse code. My speed improved to about 18 words per minute. And not long ago I got confirmation of my 100th DXCC⁹ entry worked in CW according to Logbook of The World¹⁰.

Start your own CW Endeavor

If you want to get into CW using Morse code and wonder if it is worth the effort I’d encourage you it is really fun and nerdy and lets you experience the early days of radio communication. You can build your own CW transceiver, get nice results using only a few watts of transmission power. You can reach more amateur radio operators as there are a few that only ever work in cw.

If you cannot or do not want to participate in a course like mine, the method that I used to learn the code can also be followed all by yourself. There are awesome tools like the website Learn CW Online that are available for free. For me however it was crucial to have a group to learn with. The regular classes at a certain point in time made it important to practice every day and in the end kept me going. If you can I’d recommend you also join a group or course to keep up the motivation over several months. In the end it will be worth it. My Morse buddy Peter (DL6PL) who participated in the same course as me also really motivated me to keep at it. The community and the shared experiences are what amateur radio is all about. It feels nice to share the challenge of learning Morse code with others. CW operators are forming another layer of community inside of the hobby. All of them have invested the time to get to the point where they can use the skill to have contacts with others. The conversation partners value that which makes it much more valuable than contacts in many other operation modes.

Looking back, now I truly understand why it is worth spending a substantial amount of time learning how to use Morse code for amateur radio contacts. Now go and start your CW endeavor.

Footnotes