Oh what a busy week this was !
On Thursday evening (Oct. 6) we just had the SKSE, and the weekend of Oct. 8-9 was coming up …
WES time again.
But at the same time I had been hunting for a special award, celebrating the passing of Miguel De
Cervantes, 400 years ago (see http://cervantes.ure.es/ ).
When your call is O N 7 "Don Quijote" you HAVE to get that award, right ?
Oct. 9 was the last day to get the three missing contacts to get my “Platinum” award, I only got to
that on the Sunday at 16:00 UTC. So my time in WES was rather limited, in the end I made only 6
QSOs, but … 4 of them were US stations.
Now for the special theme this time … From the depths of the junk box, unspeakable keys!
So between all this Cervantes hunting, I went into the garage and grabbed some wood and screws.
But what to use as contact points ?
I had a box full of old appliances in my garage, ready to bring to the container park (dumpster).
I saw a couple of broken clock radios and a desk lamp. So I cut off three power cords and went back
to the shack.
After some thinking … drilling a couple of holes … and using only three screws, I came to this result :
A view from the side shows how two of the pins of the power cord form the contacts, the power plug
from the third power cord is the key’s primitive “knob”. The lever is a wooden paint stirrer which
seems to have just the right tension, so I didn’t make an adjustment for that. However, the contact
distance was way too big, so I added a fourth screw halfway the lever to reduce the spacing to a
comfortable distance.
I then covered my DF key with an early "Halloween theme" ... scary stuff eh ?
You could call it a “dust cover” but I suspect it collects more dust than it protects … HI.
The key was used in all 6 QSOs, and worked quite well, though it feels rather “soft”.
Here the proud builder/owner … hope you like my “design” !
