To celebrate my 30th birthday I decided to do something a little different. Normally when I activate a peak via CW I record the entire activation and fully decode all the CW when I get home. Its slow, takes forever and now my SOTA points are backlogged waiting for me to listen to the recordings again. I tried learning CW to be absolutely proficient but I would never get to the level I wanted to be and would just give up… until now.

As of lately i have been listening to the Ham Morse app and any time in driving or doing the dishes I would really commit to character recognition and eventually word recognition. Then came the day I would put it into practice. I was super nervous and wasn’t sure how it would go. It wasn’t pretty nor perfect. I asked many Stations to repeat their calls and thanks to their patients i was able to get through MY FIRST ACTIVATION WITHOUT RECORDING IT. This is huge for me. But i wont stop here. I will keep practicing at work and at home and build up the courage to do more activations. Thanks to everyone being so patient with me. The Summits On The Air community is seriously awesome and makes activating so much fun. Seriously, give morse code a try. The contacts are much more memorable. My most exciting contact was a Summit 2 Summit from Japan!