Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016 — I’ve been staying busy most evenings between writing news and trying to complete honey-do’s, and I’ve neglected my CW net skeds for quite a while. Last weekend I made it a point to get into the shack with plenty of time in advance. While I was cleaning up a bit, a key I purchased long ago caught my eye.
This is a homebrew double key that features a Brown Brothers BTL iambic paddle paired with a Signal Electric straight key with a Navy-style knob. I picked it up on eBay several years ago, mostly because it was priced so low … the purchase price was lower than the Brown Brothers key alone was selling for, so I snapped it up. It’s a nice, compact arrangement — nothing fancy, but functional.
The Signal Electric key is a solid performer with small contacts and no shorting bar. The key suffered from a lack of use, so while I had time I grabbed the key and some 409 and decided to do a little much-needed clean-up on the key(s). The contacts on the paddle were so dirty neither paddle would key the keyer on my Yaesu FT-2000. I did a quick clean-up of the key and the contacts.
The Brown Brothers key is a simple iambic key and lacks a lot of the modern niceties you find on newer paddles, but that’s OK — the Brown Brothers paddle is a simple and effective key.
IN OTHER HAM RADIO HAPPENINGS:
— I still haven’t rewired my two long wires into a doublet fed with a balanced feed line. My wife is going out of town next week, so its on my to-do list!
— My new-to-me Mon-Key is still boxed up for now due to the lack of time to play with it. I’ll have at it this weekend, maybe even some more poorly shot video!
— Two new communication-related additions to the shack include a Hisense C-11 Chromebook (worth reviewing in near future), and a Radio Shack Pro-2096 digital APCO P-25 compatible scanner.
73 es CUL … de KY4Z SK …. dit dit …