Spacing matters.

[gil]

Hello,

I was trying to chat with an old ham (since the 60s) this morning on 14060. He was putting all his letters and words together with practically no spacing, which was nearly impossible to copy, even at a speed I was comfortable with.

When listening to code, letters just pop in my head, that is the easy part. The hard part is to string them together in my puny short-term memory to form words. When spacing isn't there however, no letters appear. That is why spacing is so important. All I got was that he built a K2 and was in GA. The man was obviously proficient, at 20-25wpm. Maybe it is just a bit of lazyness, or a bad habit developped over time...

I sent the guy a very diplomatic email explaining the problem. He might take it well, or not... I do believe it is better to tell people about their sending issues, even though I still consider myself a newbie. Someone could not realize they have a problem, and if nobody corrects them, they will keep on doing it, even getting worse.

Mind your spacing!

Gil.

[Luigi]

Gil,
One big string of characters is impossible to read for sure. No idea. Just a bunch of di and dahs. A straight key is very hard to follow when the dits become dahs. The length of the dits and dahs is also very important. Electronic keyers help with this.

Extra space between characters is not great, but much better than a single string of garbage.
c q c q d e c a l l p s e k is easier than cqcqdecallpsek.