About nine months ago, when I was embarking on my “learn Morse” plan I did quite a bit of digging, trying to find a decent quality Morse Practice Oscillator to aid in the learning. Admittedly my Yaesu FT857D has the ability to practice Morse utilising the keyer circuit and is pretty good at what it does. That said I wanted something portable so I could take the learning process wherever I wanted. There are an awful lot of circuits out there which do the job. At the end of the day all you want is something which beeps when you close the Morse key, but I wanted a degree of refinement which was fulfilled in the guise of the Morse Express T-Tone Code Practice Oscillator from Milestone Technologies.
Like most of my projects, we never got to the finish line in that I built the circuit and have been merrily using the naked PCB with a load of wires sprawling everywhere. That’s until FPARC have decided that October’s meeting will be an introduction to Morse, with a concerted effort to support those trying to learn. Better stick this thing in a box and make it road trip proof!
Now, this is hardly blog worthy, but like most achievements, the devil is in the detail. I needed to make a speaker grill so the audio tone could escape the enclosure. Not owning a CNC milling machine, a considerable amount of time was spent with a 2mm drill bit fashioning this by hand.
I’m really happy with the final result, to the point I may well go the extra mile and print some custom case decals as I did with my 1 Watter.
If nothing else it’s another “almost completed project” ticked off my list!
2E0DFU - playing with amateur radio 