Ham4CW
Administrator
Hey Folks!
Every so often while researching Morse Tutors and other Morse tuition material I would find mention of the somewhat ellusive "Morseman" Morse Tutor.
After many years of keeping an eye open for such a unit to come up for grabs I finally managed to acquire one! These units are like rocking horse droppings or hens teeth when it comes to rarity.
Having found the tutor for sale it occurred to me that some info would be of help if the unit needed any repairs or servicing. Just by chance I also managed to find a copy of the original magazine that the design originally appeared in.
It would seem that the Morseman Morse Tutor was designed by RSGB staff, primarily the 'Technical Officer' M. Noakes, G4JZQ.
The firmware (a hex dump) for the UVPROM was available free of charge to RSGB members. The society then appears to have offered a number of 'short' kits for the tutor, featuring the usual PCB, UVPROM + some (but not all) of the components, and another kit which had the switches and potentiometers.
There were a number of ways to construct the Morseman tutor, with a variety of processors of varying degrees of power consumption (depending on whether battery power or mains power was to be used).
For its time (nearly forty years ago now!) it was surprisingly sophisticated, allowing for letters only, numbers only, or mixed characters. The unit has a dot matrix display that can either be disabled, can be on continuously (displaying the character being currently sent), or can 'flash' momentarily the character just sent.
It is also possible to adjust the inter-character spacing and the inter-group spacing.
This particular unit had two minor issues when it arrived, one was the side-tone pitch was too high for my liking (it sounded like 1200Hz or so), the other was the speed was greatly out of calibration. The sidetone pitch required the addition of some extra capacitance to lower the pitch down to maybe 650Hz or so as it is now.
The speed calibration was out by a factor of nearly two! So 8WPM sounded like 16WPM, 12WPM was more like 25WPM, and 26WPM sounded like a data transmission! ;D
Again, this problem was solved by increasing one of the timing capacitors by around a factor of three.
All of the original components were checked and found to be within spec, so why both of these functions were so far away from their intended design values is a mystery.
This particular version has been built so as to run only from batteries, and to only operate with an external speaker. Also, the option for using an external Morse key was not implemented.
All in all though these are excellent little units, but do keep in mind they were all home built, with possibly a good number of junk box components, so quality may vary!
73, Mark...
Every so often while researching Morse Tutors and other Morse tuition material I would find mention of the somewhat ellusive "Morseman" Morse Tutor.
After many years of keeping an eye open for such a unit to come up for grabs I finally managed to acquire one! These units are like rocking horse droppings or hens teeth when it comes to rarity.
Having found the tutor for sale it occurred to me that some info would be of help if the unit needed any repairs or servicing. Just by chance I also managed to find a copy of the original magazine that the design originally appeared in.
It would seem that the Morseman Morse Tutor was designed by RSGB staff, primarily the 'Technical Officer' M. Noakes, G4JZQ.
The firmware (a hex dump) for the UVPROM was available free of charge to RSGB members. The society then appears to have offered a number of 'short' kits for the tutor, featuring the usual PCB, UVPROM + some (but not all) of the components, and another kit which had the switches and potentiometers.
There were a number of ways to construct the Morseman tutor, with a variety of processors of varying degrees of power consumption (depending on whether battery power or mains power was to be used).
For its time (nearly forty years ago now!) it was surprisingly sophisticated, allowing for letters only, numbers only, or mixed characters. The unit has a dot matrix display that can either be disabled, can be on continuously (displaying the character being currently sent), or can 'flash' momentarily the character just sent.
It is also possible to adjust the inter-character spacing and the inter-group spacing.
This particular unit had two minor issues when it arrived, one was the side-tone pitch was too high for my liking (it sounded like 1200Hz or so), the other was the speed was greatly out of calibration. The sidetone pitch required the addition of some extra capacitance to lower the pitch down to maybe 650Hz or so as it is now.
The speed calibration was out by a factor of nearly two! So 8WPM sounded like 16WPM, 12WPM was more like 25WPM, and 26WPM sounded like a data transmission! ;D
Again, this problem was solved by increasing one of the timing capacitors by around a factor of three.
All of the original components were checked and found to be within spec, so why both of these functions were so far away from their intended design values is a mystery.
This particular version has been built so as to run only from batteries, and to only operate with an external speaker. Also, the option for using an external Morse key was not implemented.
All in all though these are excellent little units, but do keep in mind they were all home built, with possibly a good number of junk box components, so quality may vary!
73, Mark...
