My friend, Paul, KW1L, is my CW technician—in the literal sense of the word. He is all about the technique of CW sending, even to the point where he pays more attention to how to set up a key and how to position the key and your fingers on the key than he does to actually making CW contacts. He’s always telling me that I don’t know how to send Morse Code properly.
Well, when he heard that I’d purchased a new Begali paddle, he volunteered to come over and help me get it set up properly. And, to help me do that, he volunteered to bring over his 50 g force gage (see below).
Bruna Begali actually gave him this force gage last year at the Dayton Hamvention when he purchased a key late Saturday afternoon. You can get your own from eBay. It costs $25, plus $12.90 shipping to the U.S.
As you can see, what you do is to place the arm on the paddle, then slowly apply pressure until the paddle contacts close. Then, you can read the force directly on the analog meter. Paul says that you’re supposed to set the tension to 40 g. If the reading is more or less than that, you adjust the tension and make the measurement again.
On the Magnetic Pro, there are two tension adjustment knobs on the back of the key. This moves the magnet in or out, increasing or decreasing the tension. (See photo below.) After a few tweaks, we were able to set the tension on both paddles very close to 40 g.
Yesterday, I decided to play around with the adjustments again. First, I decided to make the tension a little stiffer. The reason for this is that when trying to send at 30+ wpm, I started making a lot of errors. My hope was that increasing the tension would break the contacts faster.
Before I touched the knobs, though, I put a little dot on them. The dots let me gauge how much I turn each one, so that I turn each of them equally. I first turned each of the knobs a full turn, but that was too much tension. I backed each off a half turn, and found that a lot more to my liking.
Then, I decided to try adjusting the space between the paddles. This is a feature of the Magnetic Pro that’s not found on a lot of other paddles. To do this, you adjust the positions of the set screws on the outside of the tension knobs. (The photo above is not that great, but if you look closely you can see the screws.)
I had to eyeball this adjustment as I don’t have any kind of gauge for this measurement, but I think I got it pretty close. After making this adjustment, I had to again adjust the gap for each contact. To make this adjustment, Begali included a little feeler gage with the key. I like the gap a little wider, though, so after adjusting the gap with the feeler gage, I backed them off a little.
I made a couple of contacts after making these adjustments and like them. Now, I’m going to have to have Paul back so that he can give his blessing to my adjustments.
Links
- How to adjust iambic paddles with a dynamometer
- Morse Code: An Overview Part 3. Paul says, “Take a look at this video on how to properly send. Start at 3:25.”
Hello,
the tension of 40 gr is really a lot. I operate my Palm paddles on both sides with about 6 gr and a big Scheunemann with 10 gr measured with the above mentioned Dynamometer. The distance of the contacts is way down 0.5 mm. A known producer of paddles adjusts them by 20 gr
See also: http://hajos-kontrapunkte.blogspot.de/2016/12/pressure-measurements-for-cw-paddles.html
73 de Hajo
I guess that you have a much finer sense of touch than I do. If I adjusted the tension on my paddles to 6 g, I’d be continually making mistakes. In fact, as I mentioned, I had to increase the tension a little to break the contact faster.