"As Long As You Can Do One Useless And Pointless Thing A Day Then Life Still Has Some Meaning"

To Lift Morale In A Time of Plague 

My father was a ham, a ham radio operator, something I think he first picked up when he was in the military during WWII, though I never heard him say that's where he got interested in it.  I think he wished his children would have taken up the hobby but none of us ever did, at least not up till now,  some of us are still around.  While he played with his radios. we were more interested in playing with splints of wood that we'd stick in his little wood stove in his workshop, where he had his rig as he talked to people all over the world.  My father was blinded in the war, which is one of the reasons he was more radio oriented than TV oriented, so he didn't know we were up to no good till the air got heavy enough with smoke so he noticed it.  That we never burned his workshop down might count as a miracle.  We were real brats.  

I came across his old morse code key a week or two ago, we never transmitted with it, of course, not being licensed, the most we were allowed to do with it was to hook it up to a practice oscillator.  I mostly used it along with the pitch control to imitate space creature movie music.  That I never used it during my experiments with electronic music in the late 1960s strikes me as being kind of dim, now.  I think my brother still has it but I suspect it ran on tubes so it probably needs to be repaired. Oh, and that's what inspired my allusions to long wave radio, counting stations and QSL cards in a recent post. 

Anyway, seeing the key made me wonder how expensive it would be to get into CW.    Over the years going with many of the other experimental temporary enthusiasms, I've learned can end up in buying stuff I shouldn't have.  I've learned to check the cost of something before I take the plunge into spending money.  It turned out that this hobby can be surprisingly inexpensive if you put together your own transceiver and stick to ultra low power.  But before that I wondered what free sources there were to learn Morse code and found something I'd forgotten about the radio hobby,  they tend to be the absolute opposite of exclusive in encouraging other people to get involved.  I don't know of many other hobbies that are less prone to snobbery at the levels I'd be interested in. 

Listening to this video wasn't my first discovery online but I think it has some valuable seeming advice.  I think his advice to avoid using visual symbols because morse code is an audio experience is excellent.  I think if people learned ear training in music before they started working with notation it would probably make their progress a lot faster.  

There are a number of audio tutoring mp3s you can listen to.  

I have been listening to the WD8LQB Morse Code Learning Podcast recordings and find it is a lot better than my first plan of trying to turn the duration of sound and spacing into music notation and playing it as an audio file. 

These recordings from a radio club from Dallas are what I'm going to continue with.  

I haven't really been looking into what it would take to get a license yet, I'd want to practice listening and using the key a lot before taking that step.   

But I did find this video quite motivating, especially in that he goes into a lot of detail about people who do an enormous amount with home-built and very simple low-powered stations.  Some of the schematics of those are simple enough so I can read them and I'm the exact opposite of a techie.  

Part of the romance of it for me was coming across Morse transmissions when I was a DXer - someone who spent too much time looking for interesting sounding and exotic short-wave radio stations.   

I have to say that the first picture in his illustrations of a one-tube station made me yearn for those long passed days of sitting in my father's workshop in the dark (he didn't need lights) the place lit only by the tubes in his radios filtered through the perforations in the casing,and the amber colored dial, smelling the dust burning off of the tubes - the place could have probably been heated from the heat those produced - hearing signals from as far away as the other side of the world.  I don't know what it would take to make a one-tube rig like that, though I'd guess it's a lot easier than trying to fix one of his old radios would be.  I'd have to get up a lot more courage than I've got to go with tubes but the little home made and kit transceivers wouldn't scare me too much.  

Note:  This was another of those pieces that got posted before the final draft, or as final as my drafts get.  I revised it so it's a bit more readable.