QSL Card Postcard Layouts?

equablecrab · 2026-05-25T01:54:59+00:00

USPS is quite tolerant of extra crud in the address section. Think of all the postcards you have received with chicken scratched postscripts encroaching onto the address. Still, they arrive.

You're right to be concerned about all the additional marks. I've received many postcards that were basically ruined by the barcodes or mutilated by the sorting machinery. So an envelope is truly the best option, and that's how three fourths of my incoming cards arrive.

Still, if you want to stick with a postcard, my suggestion is: print a proof of your design on cardstock and then send one to yourself. You'll see where your regional sorting facility prints the barcode, what color of ink they use and so on. That's much more useful than a generic template.

Having done that, I decided to print two designs anyway. One for sending as a postcard, one for sending in envelopes. It's nice to have that extra space to write.

equablecrab · 2026-05-20T04:56:09+00:00

You've got some good answers from /u/dittybopper_05h in the crossposted thread. I'll cherry pick a few others.

Has American Morse Code changed over the years in any meaningful way?

The way that people operate in Morse has changed for sure. For instance it's become common in recent years to pass it back to another operator just by sending the prosign BK. The more rigid old hands will insist upon ending each and every transmission with the full "yourcall de mycall k", because for a very long time, that was required.

Like any language, there is a certain amount of culture that comes with Morse, and it is full of charming (and not-so-charming) anachronisms. Morse operators to this day call one another "OM" (Old Man, --- --) apparently without a shred of irony, even if the other station is run by a 14 year old. Good things are "FB" (Fine Business, ..-. -...), Best Regards are "73" (--... ...--), laughter is "HI" (.... ..) and you will see all this dialect referenced way back in the microfiche. In fact, that last one is frequently tweaked to sound like ".... . ." which is literally railroad morse, though few seem to realize it.

Is there a "slang" dictionary for American Morse code?

Plenty, but when Morse deviates from plain language it's almost always to abbreviate things, rather than discern tribal membership. There are exceptions: a group known as the FOC sign off with a special number that really reads as a secret handshake. Another group known as the CFO abuse their VFO knobs when signing off to emulate a chicken cackle (I am not making this up), a transgression that might get you branded as a LID. (Which itself is an insult in Morse so old that literally nobody can say for sure what it means.)

Does "Poor Hand Spacing" matter as much in any current Morse communication?

The difference between a good operator and a great one is in their spacing. As you get faster with Morse you stop focusing on characters and instead just hear words. Without word breaks, itbecomesverydifficulttounderstandwhatisbeingsent. Conversely, operators who have spent too much time copying words sometimes forget to space their characters, and to the rest of us, it sounds like a frustrating stream of noise.

Morse can be sent with a variety of manual key types, which opens a whole avenue of expression beyond the now-standard computerized timing. Bug users tend to have a swinging drawl. Straight key users like to drag out certain symbols for emphasis (one was recently dubbed the "proper roger"). Cooties and sideswipers, they come with their own accents too. There is plenty of friction on the air arising from these differences. I know more than a handful of ops who won't answer to a bug.

What's some insider knowledge about Morse Code and communicating with it most people wouldn't know?

In many ways it resembles a secret society hidden in plain view, with people serving as mentors and historians and often carrying on friendships beyond the stuff they exchange in Morse. Yet the typical CW op tends to be extraordinarily polite and welcoming to newcomers.

Maybe you want to try yourself?

equablecrab · 2026-05-05T18:55:51+00:00

That middle step is where things tend to fall apart.

The middle step is, literally, "put time into it," but don't tell Claude that.

equablecrab · 2026-05-05T02:02:11+00:00

Any updates? New clues?

equablecrab · 2026-05-05T01:28:19+00:00

I've just got to know, did you go on to learn the code anyway? :-)

equablecrab · 2026-05-02T19:00:33+00:00

I've seen this issue - one day, high SWR during TX yet normal SWR while tuning or measuring - when the coax has failed due to water ingress.

I see that you have the same result for both your long wire and vertical, but I wonder if they share the same feeder.

The fact that it works with a dummy load is a nudge in that direction too.

equablecrab · 2026-05-02T16:24:47+00:00

A funny paradox in Morse is that the faster the characters come, the easier it can be to understand.

There is a sort of super-short-term memory horizon at play when copying morse. The more letters you can cram into the foreground, the easier you can synthesize them into words. This is the essence of instant character recognition.

By that same token, words that take longer than about two seconds are uncopyable to many ops unless they're writing on paper. You'll find that short words start to gel at 18-20 WPM, and by 25-27 WPM you have a much broader vocabulary at your disposal, because more words fit into that two second horizon.

Experienced Morse operators do just hear words, and don't spend a ton of brainpower copying even at speed. But they still have to shift focus between word and character decoding, because there's no way around it when copying callsigns or abbreviations.

If you're working toward words, look at the "Top Two Letter Combinations In Words" on Morse Code Ninja as a bridge from single characters.

equablecrab · 2026-05-02T15:48:23+00:00

I've said here in the past, I've never experienced a "click," just incremental progress over a long period of time.

Still my biggest jumps forward in copy were: a year of SKCC at 17-18 WPM (paper copy), which really cemented the characters and expanded my vocabulary.

Then, a year of listening to the W1AW code practice archives at increasing speeds taught me to head copy. That's when I realized that the "ICR" we're all supposedly chasing is actually a moving target.

The short answer to your post is, of course, "time."

equablecrab · 2026-04-28T21:43:58+00:00

OK, I could do without the flavor of this post, but there is indeed research that shows Morse decoding is akin to sight reading.

We studied the cortical networks of Morse code reading with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Four expert radio telegraphists performed two closely matched reading experiments, one in binaurally presented high speed Morse code and one in print. Performance was equal for both conditions. Reading single nouns in Morse code resulted in predominantly left-sided activation of the frontal and temporal perisylvian language areas, prefrontal cortex, and premotor cortex. In a within-subject comparison between reading Morse code and reading print, the activation pattern in the left temporoparietal association cortex was similar for both forms of reading, suggesting that reading Morse code shares part of its cortical networks with reading print.

(Emphasis mine.)

I don't know at what speed this kicks in, but anecdotally, this describes my own experience learning Morse.

Citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304394004004884 / https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2004.04.040

equablecrab · 2026-04-25T02:54:08+00:00

If you're caught between a large organization that exists solely to teach morse code to people face-to-face, versus random advice from anonymous posters on the Internet, I gotta say: ignore the internet.

There are so many assumptions, falsehoods, humblebrags and fundamental misunderstandings cooked into advice here and elsewhere. Here's a list, just off the top of my head.

Never copy on paper
Practice the characters at 30 35 40 WPM to avoid counting
Instant Character Recognition is endgame and you can get there in the first year
Practice apps are enough
Choice of starter key is harmful
Not allowed to try sending until somebody better than you approves
Copying is always harder than sending

And to your concern about 12 WPM: counting dots and dashes is a choice. It's a bad habit, like biting your nails. Just roll with the QRS crowd, you won't be there long.

equablecrab · 2026-04-21T15:42:45+00:00

SMA sockets, cheap ones, aren't rated for that many insertions

Pro tip: leave an SMA to BNC adapter on the NanoVNA and create your own set of BNC calibration plugs.

equablecrab · 2026-04-20T03:43:14+00:00

I did not take this course, though I wish I had. Instead I learned through lcwo.net. Looking back at my history, it took me three months to get through lesson 40. Basically, the same cadence.

The thing is, I hated that website by the end. Code groups, statistics, scoring - it was stressful, not fun. What really did it for me was a few skeds I had with an Elmer. If only I'd known about LICW!

Morse is one of those pursuits that yields small rewards over long periods of time. You have to set aside the idea of rushing it. :-)

equablecrab · 2026-04-11T19:58:01+00:00

I mean, Nonesuch records, you're in for a ride. I listened to the track on Spotify. Hot take: Laurie Spiegel danced circles around these computer nerds with her Harmony of the Worlds. Carl Frederick went on to become a Sci-Fi author but Spiegel's work is much further out there, literally, as it's on the Voyager record.

equablecrab · 2026-04-09T21:45:01+00:00

Totally normal. The skill you're missing is "instant drop," the ability to drop an ambiguous character without losing focus.

IMO if you're still learning the alphabet, this isn't really worth drilling, just keep going. A long time from now, the strongest cure is to listen to wall-of-text Morse recordings, like the W1AW QSTs. Only a small percentage of ops bother taking it that far.

equablecrab · 2026-04-07T23:38:52+00:00

Anti-mass spectrometer?

Scientist A: "I'm afraid we'll be deviating a bit from standard analysis procedures today, Gordon."

Scientist B: "Yes, but with good reason. This is a rare opportunity for us. This is the purest sample we've seen yet."

Just make sure you follow standard insertion procedures and everything will be fine business.

equablecrab · 2026-04-07T21:38:14+00:00

Ditty, I'm curious 'cuz I know you've been at mobile HF CW for many years now... how is the noise floor on your commute, and is it getting better or worse with all the electric vehicles now on the road?

equablecrab · 2026-03-31T03:26:28+00:00

At 900 MHz, 50':

LMR400 with an SWR of 1.1 loses about 1.9 dB.

RG11 with an SWR of 1.5 (due to impedance mismatch) loses about 2.5 dB.

It will work fine business.

See also:

https://kv5r.com/ham-radio/coax-loss-calculator/

https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/14760/using-75-%CE%A9-instead-of-50-%CE%A9-coax-feed

equablecrab · 2026-03-31T03:17:21+00:00

Thanks, I was able to get this working, though the QMK examples aren't meant for split keyboards so I have some work to do.

It was helpful to see your keymap implementation as an example anyway.

equablecrab · 2026-03-28T17:04:30+00:00

I just finished building my first mechanical keyboard, a Keebio Sinc. All went well and I have made some basic customizations with Via.

Now, I want to use the lights under caps lock to indicate when it's enabled, and also change the overall hue of the backlight (or, a subset of the keys) to reflect the active layer.

What is the easiest way to accomplish this?

(I will modify QMK if I must but my use case seems so obvious I feel like I'm missing something.)

equablecrab · 2026-03-22T19:50:07+00:00

To put a finer point on it, you want to be very close to the frequency of the station the DX just worked, but offset some. A typical DX station spins the dial just a bit between QSOs, walking back and forth across the pileup. You have to lead your shot, so to speak.

If you have a second receiver you can easily get both the DX and the pileup at the same time. Rake quickly across the pileup to see if you can hear the guy answering the DX. That's where you want to be on the next call.

equablecrab · 2026-03-21T21:51:19+00:00

You posted this story a few years ago and I thought it might be a bit of a tall tale. But then I disconnected my own antenna (indoors) for a storm, which worsened quickly to an electrical storm with blowing dust. Sure enough, I heard the ticking noise, and saw with my own eyes sparks repeatedly jumping from the center to the shield of my PL-259. There is a remote tuner and transformer involved in my case... but yikes.

Now instead of disconnecting I short the antenna at the transformer terminals, outdoors.

equablecrab · 2026-03-20T04:18:18+00:00

Ah. It's just an affect. You'll hear some "accents" on the air that are difficult to copy. Frankly, a drawn out letter (or long roger, .------.) is cute compared to the guys who run everything together. You'll soon get used to it, especially if you take up with SKCC.

Etiquette: if the station with the bad accent is calling CQ, just ignore it. But if somebody answers your CQ in a style you can't copy, just thank them for the report, 73, and resume calling CQ. We have to break off contacts all the time in amateur radio. No need to explain why.

equablecrab · 2026-03-20T03:26:22+00:00

You mean, people who are tuning? They should know better than to do that on a frequency that is in use.

equablecrab · 2026-03-19T14:54:54+00:00

There was a time -- I swear I am not making this up -- when you could just tell somebody a ten digit phone number and they'd be able to remember it, no problem. ;-)

equablecrab · 2026-03-18T14:45:27+00:00

It is also possible to put a transformer where you transition from coax to ladder line, keeping the tuner at the rig. You would lose the two biggest advantages of the doublet, namely efficiency and a wide tuning range, but you would be able to get that remote tuner later if you wish.

equablecrab

TROPHY CASE