Here are three items that showed up in my Twitter feed yesterday:
- Morse Code Plays a Role in New Spielberg Movie. Producer Steven Spielberg has used Amateur Radio or Morse code in three of his last four movies: Super 8 (2011), The Adventures of Tin Tin (2011) and Lincoln(2012). Members of the Morse Telegraph Club (MTC) — an association of retired railroad and commercial telegraphers, historians, radio amateurs and others with an interest in the history and traditions of telegraphy and the telegraph industry — played an integral part in the production of Lincoln.
nanoKeyer powered by Arduino Nano. The nanoKeyer is an Arduino Nano based CW Contest Keyer Addon. It was designed specifically for use with the K3NG Arduino keyer open-source firmware adding many features and flexibility. The nanoKeyer is suitable as a standalone keyer or for keying the radio via the USB port by using the K1EL Winkeyer protocol from a connected computer and your favoured contest logging software. By means of the K3NG firmware it can be also used as a computerless keyboard keyer by attaching a PS2 keyboard to it.
Someone tweeted me about this after I Tweeted about building a second WKUSB keyer. I think that if I had known about this before my purchase, I would have gone for this instead of the WKUSB. It not only purports to what the WKUSB does, the software is open-source meaning that you could actually fool around with it if you liked. You can find more information at the Radio Artisan website.
- Digispark. Talking about tiny Arduinos, check out this Kickstarter project. It’s amazingly cool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though you can get in on this first production run.
Don says
Great reading material, thanks for posting this. I am also an avid radio operator, and enjoy amateur radio and CB, as well as operating boat anchor gear.
Ed says
One nice thing about the nanoKeyer, or rather the K3NG software, is that you can practically “try before you buy.” If you already have an Arduino lying around (and it doesn’t have to be a Nano, a typical Uno will do), it takes very few parts, which would already be in most junk boxes, to hook up the essential parts of the keyer, so you can get a feel for its features and decide if you like it.
Dan KB6NU says
Here’s a comment from W2MDW via Twitter:
Speaking of Open Source Arduino based Winkey protocol supported keyer kits! Very cool & nice! http://t.co/eyrLgIY7