straight key

Orlando Hamcation 2023

This year’s edition of Hamcation was pretty good. Definitely seemed more crowded this year than last year, which was good to see. By the time I got there on the first day (about 20 minutes before the gates opened) the parking field was pretty much full. On the second day, they were sending people over to the overflow parking area by the time I got there when it opened.

Didn’t find quite as many things to purchase this year as I found last year, but did pick up a few nice things.

Begali had a table with a bunch of their keys and paddles on display. It was a very popular booth with lots of people stopping by to check things out and send out some Morse code. After stopping by the table a few times to play with the paddles, I decided on the last day of Hamcation to pick up one of their Camelback straight keys.

It’s a very nice straight key with a nice responsive action and a solid heavy base that’s not moving anywhere when I’m keying. Very happy with it. Just need to wire it up with a suitable cable now.

Out in the flea market/boneyard area, there were quite a few people with tables set out. Seemed like not quite as many as last year though.

An interesting item I found out in the boneyard was this board with an LCD display on it.

Gabotronics Xminilab oscilloscope module

At first I thought it was just an LCD display module, so I bought it along with a couple ESP32 boards and a book for a few dollars. When I had a chance to take a closer look at it, I discovered that it wasn’t a display module at all, but a tiny little oscilloscope! Should be fun to get it running and see what it can do.

For the workbench, I found this arbitrary signal generator. I’ve been wanting to have one for the workbench for a while. Haven’t tried plugging it in and turning it on yet, so it might be a great addition, or it might become a project.

Pragmatic 2416A arbitrary waveform generator

Looking forward to playing with my new acquisitions when I have some spare time.

Straight key base

Finally got around to working on making a base for the straight key. I cut off a section of some 1×4 lumber, sanded it nice and smooth, beveled the edges and covered it with a few coats of clear gloss polyurethane.

For some grippiness so it doesn’t slide around on the desk, I spray-glued a piece of some rubber shelf liner to the bottom.

It’s not a heavy base, and I might decide to change it later on to something more interesting looking. For now, it looks reasonably decent and gives the key a slightly bigger footprint and elevates it a little bit for more comfortable use.

Got in the mood to play with the camera a bit and the most interesting subject around was the J-38 straight key.

I should really spend some time to clean it up some.

Connecting the straight key

After going through the manual for the HD-10, I learned that the terminals on the rear of the HD-10 could be used to attach a key. So off to the garage I went to put some terminal connectors on some wires to use to hook up the J-38 key to the HD-10.

It took a couple of tries before I figured out where the wires were supposed to go on the J-38. There are lots of pictures of J-38 keys on the internet, but not too many that show how the wires are supposed to be attached (the terminals are the two on the inside).

With everything connected, tapping the key made the keyer make noises and I managed to make some Morse Code sounding noises with the key. Now they can sit on the desk next to me so that I can practice tapping out Morse Code whenever I feel like.

I still need to take the key off the base and clean it up a bit, and then make up a cable that I can use to plug the J-38 into the radio with. Also thinking about seeing if I can find a nice block of wood to attach the J-38 key to for a more solid base and to elevate the key a bit.

Dit dah-dah

I’ve managed to successfully build my first electronics project since the light box I built back in Industrial Arts class in Junior High school.

After seeing one of these Morse code key kits at the Dragon*Con ham radio table I helped out with, I decided they were pretty cool and that I should try to build one. Just the thing I need to help me learn and practice Morse Code/CW.

It’s a pretty simple kit without a whole lot of components. Everything’s all made up, so it’s just a matter of sticking the right electrical bits into the proper holes and soldering them into place. It’s been a long time since I soldered anything. I practiced a little bit on some old laptop power supply parts I had laying around, then went to work on the kit. The inexpensive soldering iron I picked up at Radio Shack a while ago did an ok job, although it seemed like it took a while to heat things up enough to melt the solder. Fortunately the solder stayed in the places I wanted it to be and I didn’t make any short circuits.

I also put my Cold Soldering iron to work on a few parts, which actually worked reasonably well while the tip lasted. Because of the gap it uses in the soldering tips, the cold soldering iron works fine for large things, but is ineffective for small soldering jobs.

Total time was maybe 2-3 hours. If you’re good at soldering, it’s something that could easily be assembled in an hour or less. My soldering isn’t great, but everything works. Kind of tempted to get another one…maybe lay it all out on a breadboard and experiment with modifying it.