One hour CW sprint?

Sorry - but it may not work.  Here is my take on the subject.

Let's face the facts.  CW has never been popular in India.  I was licenced in 1965 - and active ever since only on CW and I have been trying all along to get more people interested in CW but with little luck.

At least, in my time there was a rule that an aspirant needs to make 100 contacts on CW before he is permitted to use AM so there were a few who got 'hooked on' after using CW for a while. 

You won't believe it but several newcomers approached me for help - for making 100 contacts on CW using their calls - just so that they can upgrade to SSB. Some big names are included in this, Hi.  I could make 100 contacts in a couple of hours, but I had to judiciously spread out the contacts over a month to make it look like the newbie had done it himself.  This may not be strictly ‘legal’ but for a good cause, it was OK.

I have to confess - there is one more good reason why CW was more popular in the olden days.  Import of rigs was not permitted; there were only a handful of hams with SSB rigs (smuggled or whatever) and the rest of us had to rely on home brew - and for guys like me without much electronics background, building a CW rig was the only way out.  

When I started, I used an R-107 Receiver (found in WW-II battle-tanks) and a 2 x 1625 final - "command" transmitter (found in DC3 aircraft popularly known as 'Dakota') putting out 50W or so.  Most amateurs were forced to be on CW.

We used to drool, looking at advertisements of rigs like DRAKE, SWAN, HAMMERLUND, and HALLICRAFTERS and so on in Ham magazines. No Japanese stuff those days, Hi   My first commercial rig was an American DRAKE TR4 transceiver – in 1977 or so!

No offence meant, but nowadays, for the average VU amateur, ham-radio seems to be one way of communication with his friends, that’s all.  And it is free.  So, once you have a rig hooked to an antenna, you can chat with your friend for hours - in some cases the friend is across the street from you but what the heck?

For most, this is ‘fun’.  90% of the amateurs have never opened the cover of their rigs to see what is inside.  Amateurs who are really interested in the technicalities are few.

Therefore, for starters, we need to make the mode more popular.

How many serious CW stations are there in India at the moment?  25? 50?   I personally feel that every amateur needs to know CW - at least a working knowledge - if not expertise. That was the rule in olden days. Imagine, you are in an ‘emergency’ and CW is the only mode available to you!

So, how about say, a thousand CW stations active in VU?  Wouldn't that be a dream come true?

Rajan - VU2RJN alternating with Gopi VU2CPW is running a CW net on 7015 KHz every morning at 0745 Hrs but there are not many takers.  The net is going on for years - and even today the check-ins are like 5 or 10 stations only.  I know, conditions are very poor these days, and the NC is not copiable sometimes, but we can try.

Sometime around 1982 or 83 I organized a ‘CW evening’ in Bangalore.  I was net control on the 2 meter VHF net, and I requested all the CW ops to come up on 20 meters on a certain Sunday evening, - like 50 KHz apart - and work stations. I had allotted frequencies some 50 KHz apart starting from 14005 (my favourite) and there were six stations or so all from Bangalore spread over the band. Conditions were good those days, and it was great fun - anyone tuning the 20m band would have heard 6 CW stations from VU land. I remember VU2RQ, VU2WP, VU2DX, VU2ZAP, VU2GX, and yours truly worked a lot of dx that evening.  VU stations were still considered ‘rare’ those days, probably even today.

Yes - we need to think of attractive events to make CW more popular.

So, how about a High Speed club?  We can start from 20 WPM and move up. Have an off the air contest during the hamfest.

I can think of stuff like this.  You can too, I am sure. 

This may be of interest to some of you.  In 1985, there was a contest held at the DAYTON convention.  They were playing (on the public address system) VU2TS operating the LACCADIVES DXpeditions of 1984 and there were guys trying to copy as many stations as possible in the pile up.  The pile up on 20 was unbelievable!  I was operating 14005 and there were guys calling me on 14070! 

Once CW is more popular, we can record some QSOs on the band and play it during Hamfests or other occasions and ask people to copy it.  We can even have a send-and-receive CW competition in three grades – slow, medium, and fast. So many ideas!

Majority of the serious CW operators are currently old timers. This is a direct representation of Metcalfe's law.  So I would say, the value of CW in India is proportional to the square of the number of stations one can reach in India.  Eventually, if there's no one on CW, the mode becomes worthless. 

(Here's how Metcalfe's law works: If there is a single CW station, it is useless. But when there are two CW stations, they can communicate with each other.  When there are thousands of stations, the mode has lot of value.)

Fortunately, popularity of CW elsewhere in the world has not waned.