Why the rather obtuse reference to Peter Gabriel's 1983 song “Shock the Monkey”?? Stick with me, dear reader.
I had a carpenter friend who always liked to quip “You could train a monkey to do what I do.” Of course, he would say that about most job occupations we discussed. But train a monkey to do Morse code? Probably not, but in the early 1950s you could use a Mon-Key to practice it.
Getting packages of eBay goodies is a lot like getting QSL cards from the bureau — whenever they show up it feels like Christmas. The buro cards in particular, since you don't know when they'll show up or what countries will be represented.
One of my eBay goodies was another of those “Carpe Keyum” gambles. A seller listed a very bad photo of some sort of electronic keyer. It looked like it might be a Mon-Key, the first commercial CW keyer, which entered the market in the late 1940s and was manufactured by the Electric Eye Company of Danville, Ill.
I entered the only bid on the thing, and wound up winning it. Until I opened the box, I was real sure of what I was getting. The seller's listing and photo weren't very detailed.
I was very pleased to find a Mon-Key unit in very very good shape in the package. I've only seen a few of these ever sell on eBay, and they've been fairly expensive. The poorly crafted listing hurt this one … that's obvious, or else I wouldn't have won the thing!
Electrically, the unit is rather simple. It uses three tubes and has no power transformer. A bug-style single lever paddle is housed under a clear plastic cover. The keying lever has 120VAC (line voltage) on it, so this is a key you don't want to use without the protective cover. The one I have is NOT the one in the photo, but just like it with the exception that mine has the factory finger pieces.
The seller sold it “as is and untested,” so the first thing I did was plug it in. No smoke, no exploding circuit breakers. That's the good news. The bad news is nothing happened — with the cover off the tube filaments were dead. It may be as simple as a bad line cord.
There's really not much to go bad on the unit. It has a group of highly suspicious “black beauty” tubular capacitors, which are notorious for being leaky. It also has one dual electrolytic cap, and an audio transformer for the speaker. That and a handful of resistors and that's it. The keying circuits key a relay, and that is what is used to key the rig you attach to it. I think I'll try it with my HW-16 first … I wouldn't want to fry an Icom for nostalgia's sake.
I've got the manual in hand, and I'm going to look over the schematic. This is an interesting project that I should be able to get running.
I don't know how practice a key it is to use … it sure takes up a lot of space on the operating desk. I imagine it's a noisy thing too, with that big relay clacking along … no pin diodes here.
I'm out of here for now …. CUL …. de KY4Z SK dit dit …..