THE DISPATCH BOARD
Field notes for operators — what nobody tells you before your first contact, why you stall at ten words a minute, and which of the things in your kit you will actually use.
Everything posted here is written by the station. There are no accounts and no submissions, so nothing on this board is a vote or a comment count: the meter beside each title reports how demanding the piece is — S3 if you can read it on your first day, S9 if it assumes you already have a station on the air. New to all of this? Start with the primer, then take the key for a turn.
- S3ELMER··7 MIN COPY
Your First CW Contact, Start to Finish
The exact exchange, in order, with every abbreviation spelled out — so the first time someone answers your CQ you know what happens next.
- S6PRACTICE··8 MIN COPY
Breaking the 10 WPM Plateau
Almost everyone stalls around ten words per minute. The cause is usually the same, and so is the fix: stop counting and start hearing whole characters.
- S3GEAR··9 MIN COPY
Straight Key, Bug, or Paddle
Three ways to make a dot, each with a different learning curve and a different effect on your fist. What to start on and when to switch.
- S6PRACTICE··8 MIN COPY
The Chart Is Holding You Back
Why Koch and Farnsworth both start at full character speed, and why memorising a lookup table builds a habit you will spend months unlearning.
- S6PROPAGATION··10 MIN COPY
Why 40 Metres at Night and 20 at Noon
The ionosphere rearranges itself twice a day. Once you know which layer is doing what, band choice stops being folklore and starts being a decision.
- S6··7 MIN COPY
Five Watts and a Wire
Running low power sounds like a handicap and mostly is. The argument for doing it anyway, and what CW gives you that voice cannot.
- S9GEAR··11 MIN COPY
A Wire Antenna for Almost Nothing
Half-wave dipole, end-fed, random wire — what the differences actually mean, how long to cut them, and why height beats every other variable.
- S3HISTORY··9 MIN COPY
Numbers Stations: What Is Actually Known
Decades of voices reading digits into the shortwave dark. Separating the documented record from the folklore that has grown around it.
- S3GEAR··8 MIN COPY
What Actually Goes in a Field Kit
A portable station is a series of trade-offs about weight. The short list that survives contact with an actual hillside.
- S3HISTORY··7 MIN COPY
Why CW Refuses to Die
Commercial Morse ended in 1999. Three decades of better technology later, more people are learning it than were learning it then.
ABOUT THIS BOARD
Shortwave is a field-radio simulator, and the board is where the things it cannot teach by simulation get written down. A browser can give you a key, a decoder and someone on the other end of a frequency. It cannot tell you how high to hang a dipole, why forty metres goes long after dark, or what to say when a stranger finally answers your CQ. Those get posted here.
Corrections are welcome and get made — these pages are edited rather than archived, so if something here is wrong, say so. The reference material lives separately in the primer, prosigns, Q codes and the chart.