Even if there’s someone on, getting through to them is like trying to have a turn on the floor with the prettiest girl at a high school dance.  Everyone and his dog wants to talk to an astronaut, so be patient.  Also, your geographic location is a factor.  I live in western Canada, so when the ISS comes up above the horizon, there are fewer hams wanting to make a contact.  Things become wild and woolly the further inland it goes.

However, if a phone contact isn’t possible, there’s a digipeater on board, so you might be able to make contacts with other stations through it.  Several years ago, there was also an FM repeater and I had a lot of QSOs that way.

Since you’re interested in working the ISS, how about trying other spacecraft?  I spend most of my radio time on satellites and I’ve worked stations as far away as Hawaii, Florida, and even Finland.  For more information, take a look at:

http://www.amsat.org/

By the way, to qualify for Morse code certification, Industry Canada requires only 5 WPM.  That’s a piece of cake to do and I didn’t find learning code all that hard.  I bought myself a straight key, connected it to a buzzer and a power source, and practiced on my own.  There are also a number of websites where one can practice and I check in with one of them regularly.  Right now, I can sometimes copy as much as 25 WPM which, I think, is my limit.

CW is still being used.  The lower parts of the allocated HF bands often have a lot of code traffic.  Propagation beacons use it to identify themselves and a lot of satellites use it to transmit data through their telemetry beacons.

There are other benefits to learning CW.  It teaches one patience and how to be efficient with one’s transmission.  Also, one has to listen carefully in order to understand it, and listening is a major part of amateur radio.  Also, when other modes fail to get through, CW often can, which is important in emergency situations.

That said, the only experience that I have is messing around with a crystal radio that I had as a kid (it had a cat’s whisker) and going to one ham workshop a couple of years ago.

Beyond ham, I’m interested in just about any robust way of setting up a link, including things like this: http://ronja.twibright.com/

Mostly it was talk about the weather but there was some interesting stuff about the personal lives of the kind of men who live in relatively primitive cabins in deep forests on the edges of society (seems to be the majority of the people involved in the conversation).

Apparently this network of HAM repeaters connects people as far away as Japan and Guam and you can access the entire network from your local area using a low power radio. Nifty. Sure, talking to the ISS or bouncing signals off meteor shower ion trails or the moon would be awesome, but it’s cool just to be able to sit back and listen to regular folks talking about dogs, deer and the weather… as well as the chatter of the local limousine drivers talking a few cycles up the spectrum.

FYI, there’s a repeater here in Las Vegas at VHF-FM 447.800 / 447.950. I don’t know much about amateur radio yet but now that I’ve actually heard real people talking on it, I’ll have more incentive to get a license and join in the conversation.