Checked the bands briefly tonight. The conditions seemed to be quite poor, but suddenly I got a Brazilian calling CQ with S9 strength on the 20m band. I responded directly and we had a nice QSO for a couple of minutes. The nice thing here was that he was calling with 25 words-per-minute speed and I could read and respond at the same speed without any problems. Few months ago I realized that the morse code from 20 years ago is in the backbone, but the reading speed was not at all the same as before. Now after some practising I'm at the same level as before...this crazy hobby gives nice kicks!
Obviously many hams have switched to computer sending and perhaps also CW Skimmer for interpreting morse code. According to my early experiences, these tools are not good enough for normal working. Also CW is in a strange way fun as it was intended to be, with key/paddle and listening with ears. Contests are exceptions; there I use software for sending the routine messages, tracking the bands etc....still listening has to be done the "old-fashioned way.
Computer communication is also very interesting, the digimodes and so on (as seen in my earlier postings), but CW is still unbeatable in DX efficiency, at least for me.
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