CW Operator Challenge

Why the fields are locked while it plays

Every other exercise on this site lets you type as you listen. This one does not, and the difference is not strictness - it is a different skill.

If you copy character by character, you fall behind the moment something matters. While you are writing down the name, the QTH goes past. Operators call the alternative head copy: you stop transcribing and start following, keeping the meaning rather than the letters. It feels impossible until it suddenly does not, and the only way there is to be denied a pencil.

Stopping the passage locks the questions again. Otherwise "start, stop immediately, then guess at leisure" would be the best way through the exercise, and the exercise would be pointless.

The fifth question is the real one

Four of the questions ask for something you heard: a call sign, a report, a name, a place. The fifth asks what the other station wanted - and that cannot be transcribed.

It sits in the passage as one short abbreviation among a dozen others. Somebody who is collecting letters will have it on the paper and still not know the answer. Somebody who is following the contact will have noticed it go by. The five possibilities are all things that genuinely happen:

• PSE QRS - please send slower. The most useful thing a beginner can recognise, because it is what you will want to send yourself.
• QRZ? - who is calling me? Asked when a call came through but the call sign did not.
• PSE QSL VIA BURO - confirm the contact by card, through the QSL bureau rather than direct.
• QSY UP 5 - move five kilohertz up. Usually because something arrived on the frequency.
• PSE AGN NAME - repeat the name. Everyone sends this, and everyone gets it sent to them.

Why there is chatter in the way

From the middle levels upwards, the passage contains lines that answer nothing: the rig, the antenna, the weather, how long they have been licensed. It is scattered between the useful parts, never appended at the end where it could be ignored.

That is not padding, it is the exercise. On the air the information you need never arrives alone, and the skill is letting the rest run past. Someone who tenses up at every word loses the thread exactly here.

At the two easier levels the name and QTH come twice, as they usually do in real operating - people repeat what tends to be missed. At 25 WPM and above that goes away, and you find out how much you had been relying on it.

How it is scored

Each question counts on its own. A wrong report does not make a correctly heard name wrong, and adding them into one number would hide exactly the information you learn from.

One distinction is made in the feedback: if your answer differs in exactly one position - 579 for 599 - you are told so. It is still wrong, because a report that is half right is worthless in a log. But "misheard" and "missed" are different problems. Misheard means two characters sound alike to you and you should drill them. Missed means the speed was too high. Only one of those is fixed by slowing down.

The full passage is shown afterwards, so you can see where the thing you missed actually was.