I grew tired of listening to random text and QSO's, in an attempt to increase my
Morse code copy speed, so I decided to take a page from K7QO's book, and create
my own book in Morse code. Chuck Adams, K7QO, used to offer books, converted
to Morse, on his website (http://www.k7qo.net), but
gave them all to the FISTS CW Club. These books are now available directly
from FISTS at: http://www.fists.org.
The only problem I have with these books is they start at 20 WPM, which
doesn't exactly help those of us who are struggling to get our copy speed up to that point.
To address this, I decided to convert Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars,
to Morse. The character speed is 25 WPM throughout the book, but the
overall word speed slowly increases from 12 WPM, to a maximum of 25 WPM for the last
five chapters. Each chapter was broken down into 15 - 20 minute audio files,
at the designated word speed, and there are a total of 276 audio files.
I haven't decided whether I will create any other books in Morse code, but if I get
enough positive feedback from "readers", I will undertake the next book in the
series: The Gods of Mars
My U.S. Call Sign Generator Program
I originally wrote the U.S. call sign generator program to help me learn
to copy call signs better for Field Day. The original version
was written in C as a Unix/Linux console application, and the output must
be redirected to a text file in order to save the call signs for future
reference, like this:
me@mycomputer$ csg > callsigns1.txt
The output can also be "piped" into the Unix/Linux "tomorse" program, to
generate a .WAV audio file (this example creates 50 call signs with punctuation,
prosigns and portables, and generates the output at 20 WPM code and character speed
with a 700 Hz pitch):
The Unix/Linux version source code is released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2.0. You are free to use and/or modify the program and source
code under that license only. Please see the inclosed "LICENSE.TXT" for
more information.
A friend of mine, who uses Microsoft Windows™ exclusively, asked me if
I would be willing to port the call sign generator program over to Windows.
I took the challenge and did so. The Windows™ version was written
in C++, using Microsoft™ Visual C++ 6.0™. It will do pretty
much the same thing as the Unix/Linux version, except it is limited to 1,000 call
signs (who wants to copy more than that anyway!), and you must save the resultant
call signs to a text file. After saving the files, you can load them
into pretty much any Morse code software, like the G4FON Koch Trainer program.
Here is a screenshot of the program:
This program is free for the taking, but has no warranty on it,
implied or otherwise. I doubt it will destroy your
hard drive though :-) You may freely pass this program to any
friends or aquaintences, just don't remove the copyright from
the "About" dialog.
