Morse Beacon Keyer

[bad andy]

This is an improved drawing of the Morse Beacon Keyer from High Frequency Beacon Society. Let me know if anything needs to be corrected. Some of the values were a little hard to read on the original.

Video of Morse Beacon Keyer testing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN6QJ6nOC04

[Tube Shortwave]

Wouldn't that circuit in the above schematic actually be sending " O S   "?

SO much easier, and fancy IDs possible, using a PIC for a keyer these days.

[bad andy]

Yes, Good eye. It should be sending "OS". Must have been a typo on the original. Dash Dash Dash is "O" and Dot Dot Dot is "S" I will correct and repost the plan.

[cmradio]

SO much easier, and fancy IDs possible, using a PIC for a keyer these days.

Darn kids and your PIC's

* cmradio old man hugging his 6J6 beacon.

Peace!

[Token]

Or something like the Parallax Basic Stamp 1 or 2 could be used.  The 1 would draw only 1 mA while working and the 2 would be about 3 mA.  Both can hold a couple thousand lines of code and send whatever CW you want it to, while reading sensors and including that in the CW stream.

Buying them from Parallax can cost a bit (BS 2 is about $45) but I ahve seen them on Epay for less than $20.

[syfr]

How about a tutorial with what's involved, for we potential builders?

[syfr]

Thanks Bad Andy...I think I can now see enough to get this working

[Seamus]

The BASIC Stamp line is a good inroads into microcontrollers, and you can do plenty with them.  I find them to be fairly expensive for what you get, though. 
I transitioned from the Parallax products to PIC micros several years back, and am now in the process of swinging to AVR micros instead.  There are whole families of microcontrollers that outperform the BASIC Stamps for much lower prices ($5 a pop in single-unit quantities), and it's possible to pick and choose from scaled-down micros that include just the features you want at correspondingly lower price points and current consumption.

It's great building simple machines using little 8-pin low-power microcontrollers that you can throw around like tic-tacs though - and even in small quantities, their price is amazingly low  (less than $2 unit price).

The other day, I was marveling once again at the fact that I could purchase a tube of chips, each one more than 20 times faster than my first computer, with over 30 times the memory, and far more capable with built-in support for several different communication protocols, multi-channel analog-to-digital conversion, and many other features and functions that were never even approximated in that old machine -- all for less than $5 each.  I think we paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 for that computer in 1978.

Admittedly, the Stamp series is very easy to get into, and I've made many projects based on the platform.  I just prefer to use my micros bare, instead of packaged as Stamps.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.  I just find price to be a pretty big motivator, especially in my current situation.

[bad andy]

 Just finished this keyer!
Put a LED in line for testing and im now watching it key DASH DOT DOT DOT space DOT DASH (BA). I added a few notes and corrected some things on the Keyer plan at the top of page. Here is the link to the video showing the Morse Beacon Keyer being tested using an LED to flash the CW. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN6QJ6nOC04