Kanga K-16 Keyer

[foggycoder]

Actually, you can't see the keyer in the photo 'cos it's inside that old tobacco tin alongside a rechargeable PP9 battery.

There's an On/Off switch. And a "power on" LED 'cos I keep leaving it on (it goes into a dormant mode after a period of inactivity but there's still a slight drain on the battery).

I only wired up one of the control buttons because I don't need any of the memories. This one button enables me to program the K-16 using code letters keyed by my paddle. There's a speaker to give you audio feedback as you're inserting these control sequences. I recommend that you write the control sequence down because its easy to get lost in the middle.

Here's a good question (which took me a little time to figure out the answer to): if the speed is set to a lot faster than you can send, how do you enter the control characters to slow it down? The answer is that as soon as you enter the programming mode, the control code entry speed drops to about 10 wpm and even beginners can send a single character at that speed. Phew.

So, a bit of soldering required and a bit of a faff to adjust parameters. But it has a lot of functionality (most of which I don't use - just the Ultimatic mode and varying the speed).
And it's cheap.

Recommended.

 

[Ham4CW]

Just had a look on Kanga at that unit, looks a neat little design. I see it was designed by K1EL. I have one of his WinKeyer USB units here. It came from Kanga but was discounted due to it being the last one and I think there was an instruction sheet missing.

The new ones Kanga sells now seem to suggest they are of surface mount construction, but I'm sure the one I have here uses through hole devices (so maybe an older model?).

A small keyer I have here was from https://www.electroresales.com/radio-communications.html and is called a "Versatile Mini Iambic A/B Keyer" (it's about half way down the page from the link above). They sell via eBay and I think it cost about ?15 plus shipping. I was annoyed at them though because there listing showed only one remaining but I really wanted two. After buying one I looked at the listing about an hour later and another one had been added back on. The annoying thing was that you paid shipping on the first item and the rest were shown as free shipping, but of course, if they only list one at a time then you have to pay two lots of postage if you try to obtain two units.

I use it mainly for practice and to test paddle keys with. The battery has been going for maybe two years now and still works fine.

It has a command button and two memory buttons, but I tend to only use the command one, and that is just for speed changing. First tap of the button gives a "C" in Morse (command mode), and to change speed you just tap the left or right paddle (decrease and increase speed). Then, tap the button again and you get a "D" in Morse (done).

Battery is the usual CR2032, and it uses a PCB sounder for the side tone 'speaker'. The two jack sockets are paddle key input and transistor keyed output. I've seen other versions of these open source keyers for sale in a neat little plastic case, and to be honest I think next time I will go for one of those. It's very easy to short out the PCB, but so far no real damage has been done! :