www.steeman.be

It looks like a standard audio jack, but in fact it is a lot more than that. Bear with me…

One day I was operating on an IOTA DXpedition from Holmön island (IOTA EU-135), when someone asked me for a CW QSO. Because of weight limits (and I admit, also because I am a lousy CW op anyway :-)), I didn’t pack my keyer. I explained this to the caller, but he really wanted the QSO. I said: “stand by while I go to the kitchen”. He said “QSL”, I could hear the confusion in his voice.. So I came back with a fork, bent one of the pins, and started feeling inside the key jack on the back of my TS-50 until the fork made a short circuit and the rig keyed up. It took me 5 minutes of sending crap on a frequency with lots of folks listening in, but I finally managed to make the QSO… After completion, we went back to SSB, and the caller asked me how I managed to send such crappy CW. I replied: “I keyed it using a fork in the key jack”. I could hear him rolling on the floor laughing…

The moral of the story is, you can send CW with anything but a tuna fish! As I didn’t want to kill off my rig with this sort of trickery, I started thinking about building a really small key for the occasional CW contact on my next expeditions. I figured out that glueing a miniture PCB button into a mono 3,5mm jack would be the easiest solution.

Just plug this miniature key into the key jack on the back of your rig, tap the exposed end of the microswitch with your finger, and make the contact. Not the most perfect solution, but it sure beats hardcore fork keying!