KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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CW-ELMER: a fun tool for analyzing your fist

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 05:43 AM PST
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As Ive written in the past, my friend Paul, KW1L, is a real CW technician.
So, when I saw the article, CW-ELMER Advanced Morse Code Learning System, I
knew hed be interested in it. And, since all it takes to build it is an
Arduino, a speaker and a 162 LCD display, I already had all the parts.

Or, so I thought. As it turns out, the display specified in the article
uses a serial interface and my 162 display has an I2C interface. A quick
email to the author, David K7DUN, not only yielded some advice, but an
updated version of the software. I connected up all the components as shown
in the figure below, andÂ*the thing began to play.



This little device has a couple of interesting features that Ive not seen
before. Its ANALYZE function, for example, measures the lengths of the dits
and dahs that you send and then calculates the average length and compares
that to a target value. It also gives you the max and min lengths of the
dits and dahs of the text you sent.

If your sending is way off, you can go to the EXERCISES section and
practice just dits and dahs. As you send these elements, the LCD displays
the length of the dit or dah that you just sent and the target value. There
are also exercises for intra-character pause, character pause, and word
pause.

I havent tried connecting a keyer to the thing yet, but it could be useful
when used with a keyer, too. Using this, you should be able to determine
how consistent the dits and dahs that your keyer sends really are and get
an indication of how consistent your character pauses and word pauses are.
(Paul often chides me that I sometimes crowd my characters.)

All in all, this is a fun little project for those who want to really
perfect their sending. If you do decided to build one, be sure to email
K7DUN and get the latest version of the software.Â*Ill publish a little more
about how this thing works after Paul has played with it for a while.

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