Eager to practice your CW skills but you have nobody to practice with? In some countries like Malaysia, CW knowledge and proficiency is still required to operated HF portion (except 10 meter) of the Amateur Radio band.

Having said that, I’d like to present CWirc, an XChat irc client plugin which enables you to send and receive morse code through IRC. Developed by a fellow ham F8EJF, CWIrc has a lot of features which really enhance your CW experience on the internet, including the option of hooking up a real CW keyer using serial port interface.

CWIrc enables you to exchange morse code with fellow irc users on the internet, provided that the other users also knows morse code and has installed CWIrc. Though this might sound a little bit of a stretch when thinking the odds of meeting people with both requirements, it is actually not so in reality. You can find those kind of people exactly in #cwirc on irc.freenode.net server who are eager to chat with you in CW.

Screenshot

Requirements

• Linux (or Unix based) machines (I personally used Ubuntu)
• XChat IRC Client
• CWIRc plugin

Both XChat and CWIrc are included in Ubuntu (as well as Debian) software repository, so you don’t need to compile or download separate package from their respective websites.

Tags: amateur radio, Computers, cwirc, hamradio, irc, linux, morse, plugin, qso, ubuntu