Tongue Depressor Straight Key

[foggycoder]

The contacts are copper self-adhesive tape (as used for sticking round the tops of flower pots to repel slugs). The knob is just a jelly-plastic foot from some discarded electronic device.

I built this to see if it would work on CWCOM. It does.

Unfortunately I'm not a straight key man so I'm not qualified to say whether its any good or not. But it does show that a straight key, at its simplest, is just a switch. A morse code buddy of mine has made one out of a clothes peg - that works too.

 

[Ham4CW]

Well, it certainly looks believable as straight keys go. bd

I've never used tongue depressors but I have used strips of single, or double sided PCB material. That works quite well because of the extra springiness the metal adds.