{"id":384,"date":"2017-04-27T15:13:02","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T22:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.n1rwy.org\/?p=384"},"modified":"2017-04-28T14:57:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T21:57:58","slug":"cw-keying-from-your-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.n1rwy.org\/?p=384","title":{"rendered":"CW keying from your PC"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As we get closer to Field Day 2017 and the summer VHF contest season I decided it was time to build (or in my case find<\/em>) a serial port keying interface to use between the logging computer and the radio.<\/p>\n

Back in the early 2000’s I was active on 144 MHz EME (Earth Moon Earth) with around 700W and a 4 square of CC13B2 from grid FN54. It was a quickly thrown together station with the preamp in the shack, but it worked and got me on the air, working several countries and stateside stations.\u00a0 JT65 and high speed meteor scatter software was just starting to be developed, so 99% of the moon bounce activity was still good old CW.<\/p>\n

Transmit CW for a minute, receive for a minute until the QSO was completed.\u00a0 I had built a small CW interface between my Texas Instruments laptop (running Windows 95) to the FT-847 radio.\u00a0 This would allow me to pre-program my CW sequences and with a function key select the right sequence and transmit them for the 1 minute cycles.\u00a0 I was using the old Log-EQF software<\/a> (DOS version), to handle sending the CW and I remember that whenever I would open a new window or a new program on the laptop when I was sending, the CW I was sending would\u00a0 S\u00a0\u00a0 L \u00a0 O \u00a0 W\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 down as the computer processor was being tasked to do other things. \u00a0 Ha!\u00a0\u00a0 I quickly made a point to not do anything else on that computer when it was sending CW.<\/p>\n

So, after tearing down the EME station and moving 3000 miles across the country, the interface I built got tucked away somewhere “safe” (you all know what that means<\/em>), and I moved out of Maine and into Arizona.<\/p>\n

Flash forward to 2017 and the preparation for Field Day 2017 with the Queen Creek<\/a> group.\u00a0 In 2016 we did real well compared to the previous years, however, we quickly discovered that we need to focus on CW if we want to place higher in the event.\u00a0 One solution that will help new CW operators is to have a CW interface from the logging computer, so they do not have to send with a key, but rather listen, and type the call sign of the station calling into the software and let the logging software call\/ reply to the station.\u00a0 Pretty slick, and it takes away a lot of the stress from the new CW operator from having to worry about having a “poor fist”.<\/p>\n

So, if you want to do this, what options do you have?<\/p>\n

Plenty!<\/p>\n