Sunday Oct. 11, 2020
A long-awaited arrival to my Morse key collection arrived yesterday — finally — after a lengthy trip from the Netherlands: a Dentsu Seiki DA-1 electronic keyer.
The keyer is based on the single-lever mechanism that forms the basis for the Hi-Mound BK-100 bug. The paddle that protrudes from the front is a dead giveaway of the keyer’s heritage.
The key has been on eBay awhile, and after giving it a lot of consideration, I decided to buy the thing. Frankly, I had quite a bit of anxiety about shipping the key here from the Netherlands; the material used to create the paddle is extremely fragile; I have seen those paddles (as part of the Hi-Mound bug) literally bust into a zillion pieces.
But God bless my seller; he packed it well, particularly the paddle, which would have been really inconvenient to remove from the keyer for safe shipping.
But one thing I didn’t really consider was the fact that this keyer wasn’t marketed in the U.S., and the power for the thing is 220v per use in Europe. The key also operates off of 12vdc; its ironic that it has a three-way power switch; flip it up for AC, flip it down for DC, and the center position for “OFF”.
I wanted to see if the key worked, but a 220v European outlet isn’t exactly standard equipment for homes in Central Kentucky. The seller’s short description did verify that the key works, which was good news. I still wanted to test the thing, but how?
I remembered that last year I had to buy my son a new power supply for his Nintendo Switch. And as it turns out, the power supply was a European version that was sold with a U.S. adapter. All together its a cumbersome outfit, but it works, and since my son wasn’t paying for it, his grumbling was kept to a minimum (hi hi). I borrowed his adapter from his Switch and headed back up to the shack.
The key — once I had it plugged in correctly — came to life just fine. I had to play with the adjustments a big, but it all worked as advertised. And believe it or not, I actually found an instruction sheet for the keyer — which was much needed since the rear connections aren’t labeled!
CW FILTER HELP! Tonight there was a CW contest underway when my CW traffic net was going to start. Normally, a crowded band isn’t a problem; but the SB-102 I’m using has no CW filter, so my only choice was to use the old “gray matter” CW filter, which had me filtering three different CW signals, two of which was significantly stronger than the NCS I’m actually trying to copy.
After checking in, I opted to grab the CW audio filter I purchased and repaired sometime back … not because I’m in love with the filter, but because it was the only one within reach in Studio C. The filter worked well enough to narrow the bandwidth and cut out the extra signals, which made me quite happy.
The band changed dramatically as the net wore on; by the end, the NCS was very weak but still readable.
I’m not sure I had the filter adjusted properly, but it still did what it was designed to do — narrow the bandwidth enough so I didn’t have two adjacent CW signals to deal with. It’s important to remember that the ETS unit is an old-style audio filter, so it isn’t going to be a precise as modern DSP.
More to come later … 73 es CUL … de KY4Z … SK … SK … (dit dit) ….