Here are two new CW products from Europe that I’ve come across in the past couple of days. It kind of amazes me that folks continue to produce CW products. If you go by the level of activity on the CW bands, you’d think that no one would be buying these things.
TKEY-0 Mini Touch straight Key. I think this is great idea, and I’m surprised that no one else has thought of this before. At €14 (+€7 shipping!), it’s kind of expensive, but it should be buildable for a fraction of that cost. I may just have to build my own. A touch key like this should be a lot easier on the wrist than a standard straight key.
Morserino-32 is a multifunctional device for learning Morse code or improving Morse code skills. It has the following functionality:
- CW Keyer
- Code Generator
- Echo Trainer (repeat what you hear)
- CW Decoder (from a straight key or from audio input)
- CW Transceiver, using LoRa in the 70cm band
It has built-in capacitive touch paddles, but you can also connect external paddles.
One unique feature is the LoRa transceiver. This allows two or more Morserinos to communicate with one another on the 70 cm band at distances up to several hundred meters.
A complete kit costs €80, which seems a little on the steep side, but the software is open source, so you could theoretically cobble together your own hardware and just adapt the software. The Kickstarter page doesn’t say if the hardware is going to be open source, so you can probably assume it won’t be. Because it’s a Kickstarter project, it is presumably still under development, and none of the documentation is available yet.
Paul Egan says
Good post and interesting items. Thanks.
I see the Touch Key has a parts list and schematic in the manual on their download page. Fun little project for a cool fall evening.
73 de Paul VA3ZC
Willi says
Dan, the Morserino-32’s documentation and schematic will be published and open source. Eventually also the Gerber files for the PCB will be published (but not initially).
Re the price: these kits are sold more or less at cost, with maybe a 5% margin, to deal with defective parts, returns etc.. A very powerful microcontroller is being used, that also comes with LoRa transceiver functionality.
I believe it will be hard to find anything comparable…. ;-)
Dan KB6NU says
Great! I’m looking forward to seeing the documentation and the unit itself. A friend of mine purchased one from the Kickstarter.