CWops club

CW ops in action

Greetings to all my blog readers I think it's safe to say that a majority of you 6 months ago never thought we would be where we are today! Life is so fragile along with our environment my hope and prayer is that all of you stay safe. I am so thankful that up to this point Julie and I are doing just fine without any COVID 19 issues. I'm retired so I can stay at home and Julie is an essential service and has to go to work but she may be able to work from home soon. I am so so so thankful that I have a pension income and that Julie is still working my heart and prayers go out to those who I can't even for a second imagine what you are going through. To all the essential workers such as medical, grocery store, pharmacy, truckers, call centres, the essential trades, border patrol, military, firefighters, EMS, police, public transit and please forgive me if I missed your type of work that helps the wheels turn during this time. Thank you thank you very very much!

Ham radio is a very good way to pass the day and I was thinking today how ham radio can play a key roll in this time we are in. My radio time was very simple yesterday basically turn on the radio and see what is going on out there. My wife works these crazy shifts and Friday is never Friday and for the next 6 weeks, our Friday is Tuesday. So we both just say thank god Friday is coming and when it's it's actually Tuesday so when it's Wednesday it's our Saturday. Having said that yesterday when I flipped the radio on and 20m was dead and I thought why is it dead on a Saturday........WRONG it's really Wednesday.

All of a sudden the band became very busy with CW traffic and I was not sure what was going on so I ventured over to WA7BNM contest page which is a fantastic site for contest goings-on. It turns out from 1300 -1400 it was the CWops mini CWT contest and WOW was it ever busy.

The CWops or CW operators club has only been around since January 2010 and according to there website now have over 1000 members and I would think that to date it's more than that. Even more exciting is that in 2012 the CW academy was founded within CWops. The CW academy is for those who are interested in learning code to those who want to improve their speed and then at the top end those who want to head copy the code! CWops also have a morse code trainer page this is a very detailed page and I can only imagine the hours that were put into its creation. With the spare time that has been unexpectedly placed upon our lives and if your interested in morse code or want to improve your code the CWops page is the place to go. I have enrolled in their intermediate coarse and opted to start in the fall as I am not sure I can put the time aside that is needed during the summer.