Operating CW is not as difficult as it sounds at first. With practice and patience anybody can be a fine cw operator. It takes about half an hour of practice everyday to master the keyer in a short time.

CW QSOs are more robust and with a few keystrokes a lot of information can be exchanged. When using CW you must be aware of common abbreviations used by ops. Those abbreviations help to speed up the QSO and use a standard and language independent format for conversation. The most important are the procedure signals and Qcode signals. With procedure signals one defines the structure of the message and with Qcode a lot of information can exchanged with only three letters.

A QSO counts as successful when name, location and signal report are exchanged between the amateurs. The signal report in CW is three numbers indicating the readability, signal strength and tone also known as RST. Nowadays with the modern radios most, if not all, tone reports are perfect (9/9).

There are a lot of clubs worldwide that support the use of CW. These clubs are organizing contests and have special awards for CW ops. Links can be found at my Links page.

EUCW is the European Union of CW clubs. At it's pages you will find lots of information about CW clubs.

Articles about CW operating

Iambic sending by K5FO
20WPM and more by KH7M
Iambic mode A/B by WB9KZY

Tables of CW operation are used here by kind permission of K3WWP.

73 de SV1JSB