Telegraph key

cathead

cathead

CATWERKS LTD
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Feb 7, 2013
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Today was the second day of my telegraph key build and it is beginning to take shape. It needs contact points and some binding posts
yet as well as being mounted on a good solid hardwood board. I picked copper because I had a bunch of 1/4 square stock left from
the old CP200 Miller welder I junked out. In it's annealed condition it is fairly easy to form to the desired shape. Silver solder was used
with an acetylene torch during assembly. Another reason for the copper and brass is that when it is done and given a high polish, it
has an attractive look to it. Here is a photo of it in it's present condition.P1030596.JPG
 
Very nice. Are you learning morse?
 
Here's another one I made a few years ago. It's more of a machinist's version of a telegraph key. The new one
is done without much machining to speak of. It's more like working with jewelry I guess.








P1020565.JPG
 
It's taking shape. All that is left to do is to make some binding posts and mount the key on a nice board. P1030602.JPGP1030603.JPGP1030599.JPG
It's made of only copper and bits of brass with a gram or two of silver for the contact points, assembled using silver solder.
 
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Cool, Are you a Ham radio operator?

I passed my 20 WPM extra test. But I never got good enough to do much work at that speed. At best I was probably only good enough to hold a conversation at maybe 10 wpm. A quick RST exchange maybe 15 if I was lucky.

Tim
KC7EAY
 
I grew up around this stuff. My dad was an amateur extra class. He still gets on 2 meter voice. He used to do EME (moon bounce) and Meteor Scatter (radio signal reflected off the ionized trails left by meteors during a meteor storm). His call sign is WB5BKY. We were neighbors with K5LAD, who owned Radio Incorporated in the 60s through 80s. Dad had QST cards (contact cards) from around the world. His first "fast" key was a Vibroplex, which moved side to side, with a long weighted springy contacts for the dots and dashes. This was before the days of the LM555 chip which was used to make a lot of electronic keys. His 1200 Watt P.E.P transmitter was built from scratch; it had forced air through a pair of 4CX250 tubes with a plate voltage of about 2500 volts. The front end of the receiver was using the (then new) FET transistors. It was a quite a rig, with a stacked Yagi array which totaled 144 elements. The antenna was also built by hand. As I recall the antenna rested on a Rohn 45 tower in the back yard.


I got up to 5 WPM for Novice class, but just lost interest in it because I had become an adult and was moving out of my parent's home.
It was hard for Ham radio to compete with cute girls and fast cars.

These days, REAL RF guys are getting harder to find. One of our labs had an opening for one, which stayed open for over a year. Very few engineers these days can speak and do RF.
 
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They do not teach rf anymore.

Been in the biz since 1979, started in land mobile, went to nextel, cellular and back to land mobile.

Very hard to find folks who understand it.

Now it. Is just "boxes and wires"...

Sent from my SM-G781V using Tapatalk
 
tq60,

Your statement makes sense. It explains the dire shortage of people who can even do simple things, like path loss calculations, and Fresnel zone calculations. None of the applicants could even do the basic calculations for a Yagi antenna. They acted like tuned circuits on the input of a RF stripline circuit was the darkest of black magic. None could calculate a PI network. And heaven sakes, a basic Pentode circuit was far beyond them.

And no, I do not consider myself among those who are true masters of RF circuitry. Perhaps it is true that Engineers eat their young.
 
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