Connor tells me that there are a few of you interested in learning and using CW. Being a die-hard fan of CW (also known as a "didiot" or "blip jerk"), I'm obviously supportive. There is a romance to radio and CW is, at least for me, a big part of that. There's nothing quite like a snowy winter's evening aglow by the radio's dial lights in a warm room perfumed with the sound of CW. It's the stuff that frames disasters like the Titanic (the first use of SOS), places WWII military communications in context, defines merchant marine drama, and it's what gave us weather information from all the ships at sea, and kept passengers on ocean liners in touch with business, friends and family during their voyage. CW has a significant place in history. See http://www.radiomarine.org/ for some historical background.
Even today, CW is a remarkably simple means of digital communications because the UART or CODEC that facilitates encoding and decoding of the digital information is in the wetware between our ears. It may not be as robust as modern digital communications but it's lots faster than SMS texting (see http://www.ku3o.net/morse/ for two different video flavors of a famous competition on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno"). If nothing else, you'll find this amusing.
CW has another charming aspect in that it is difficult to be rude using CW. You'll hear terrible, even obscene stuff on 75 m at night as Olde Fahrts discuss their prostate issues, hemorrhoids, and gas problems seasoned with some truly hateful comments. I can pretty much guarantee that all these guys passed the 20 WPM CW requirement. So, there's dispositive evidence that CW was not (and so is not) in any way a "filter" that prevents riffraff from obtaining licenses. But you won't hear stuff like that on CW because it takes far too much effort. You'll find CW ops to be cordial, polite and well-disciplined far more often than not. The same goes for RTTY and other digital ops as well. Now, don't get me wrong -- the vast majority of hams, whether they operate phone, CW or any of the other digital modes, are fine, polite, cordial and considerate. But you will find the small minority that isn't relegates itself almost exclusively to phone. Since it's easy to be a jerk on 'phone, that's where the jerks go.
I've attached a PDF that goes into some detail about CW. "The Art and Skill of Radio Telegraphy" is about as comprehensive as you are likely to find and I've attached it to this message. The link http://http://www.g4fon.net/ has a menu on the left side of the screen with an entry called "Koch CW Trainer Version 9." This is a program that facilitates the "Koch method" for learning CW. The Koch method originated in Germany just prior to WWII and was devised by the German psychologist Ludwig Koch around 1935 or so, when the German military needed to turn out radio operators proficient in CW as quickly as possible. As an aside, ham radio was very limited in Germany prior to WWII. At the same time, the U.S. got most of its initial radio operators from the pool of available ham radio operators and, yes, hams were targeted for drafts into service along with a lot of ham equipment, with compensation of course.
The Koch method is one of the most efficient methods for learning CW and I highly recommend it. No, I didn't learn Morse code this way -- learned it the wrong way by looking at dots and dashes on a page and then translating those visual symbols to sounds. Because I had a musical background, I got past the translation stage rather quickly, but it would have gone a lot faster if there had been a way to implement Koch's method back in 1970.
73,
Kim N5OP
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Kim Elmore, Ph.D. (CCM, PP SEL/MEL/Glider, N5OP, 2nd Class Radiotelegraph, GROL)
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." – Attributed to many people; it’s so true that it doesn’t matter who said it.