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iCW keyer
14 July 2017 | by Around this time of year the kids finish school for the summer holidays and Mrs g7kse takes them for a week away with her before I get some time off myself. It’s a short break but the house is across the road from the beach and the kids love it. As does Angus (the dog). I then have a week at home / work where the place is a bit quiet. So time to catch up on a few loose ends and perhaps an evening mountain biking before I join them at the weekend.
This time I’m planning on building up the iCW keyer that I have. Well I say have, it’s a blank PCB that Chuck W5UXH was kind enough to give me earlier in the year. I can’t currently use iCW very effectively and my CW is suffering so this is somewhat needed. Now.
The keyer board is the full monty. It has all the bells and whistles and uses a new, to me, fubarino microcontroller. Slightly larger than an Arduino micro and with the provision for an SD card it offers the ability to store ebooks that will form the ability to play dit’s and dah’s as a stand-alone unit. The PCB is slightly larger than I’m used to but is well produced and uses professional parts all available from Mouser. It should take a few hours to build and test, perhaps an uninterrupted evenings work but we’ll see how well that goes and review the time at the end.
In summary….I need to turn this stuff into something useful. Wish me luck!
3 Responses to “iCW keyer”
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Good morning Alex, In the past I had done some reading about ICW but was not sure how to get the hardware needed to get things up and running. I see you have a kit that looks like a great project! I’m very interested to know if these kits are still available and if so where to get them?
73
Mike
VE3WDM
It wasn’t a kit Mike. i got the PCB from Chuck, w5UXH as I was struggling to get a clean signal into the PC so needed a separate keyer.
iCW set up is a lot easier than you might think. A good audio signal into the PC is pretty much all you need. Output via the PC speakers.
Hi Alex! I’ve not heard of iCW before but after reading your article I started looking for same on the internet to gain more information. Little information was found. So, from what I understand, once the iCW is built, and you download the software, you can communicate through CW with others logged into the same software through your pc, right? It’s probably not possible to do the same through EchoLink, right? Thanks for your time, Alex!