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The Toupee Fallacy is a logical fallacy in which one thinks something is of poor quality because they only notice poor quality instances of it. People can always detect a bad toupee, but good toupees are hard to pick out because they look like real hair.

I used to think all CW bugs and bug operators sent lousy code. They’re easy to identify on the air, often with something like a 10:1 dah to dit length, rather than the standard 3:1 ratio, and a dit speed seemingly 15 WPM or more faster than the operator can handle. Now that I’ve be playing and practicing with my Begali Intrepid bug, I’m convinced the good bug operators are hard to detect on the air because their code is so good it sounds like it’s coming from a CW keyer or a skilled straight key operator.

The Begali Intrepid is a little intimidating at first. It has almost as many adjustments as a color cathode ray TV from the 70s, but once you read the documentation and play around with it, it’s fairly easy to tune the instrument to your liking. With the dual pendulum weights, it’s easy to slow down the dit speed for new bug ops like me.

This article was originally posted on Radio Artisan.