Monday night, Jan. 25, 2021
After setting my 1936B Mac Key bug aside, I turned back to my venerable old Bencher BY-1. The Bencher is the gold standard of iambic keys, and I have several of these keys. But the BY-1 isn’t the only quality iambic to chose from.
While I’ve been cleaning up the shack getting ready for the move up to Studio C, I ran across one of my Brown Brothers BTL iambic keys.
This particular key has the Brown Brothers label with the blank “serial number” spot, with BTL stamped there in black ink. The paint on the key has quite a few chips, but it doesn’t affect the key’s operation. I took time to clean up the key and adjust it. Like an old friend, the Brown key is extremely comfortable to use, simple to adjust, and just flat dependable.
Comparing the Bencher and the Brown Brothers key, the main difference in my perspective is that the Brown keys are less “fragile” than the Bencher. The Bencher works great, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t knock the Brown finger pieces catty whompuss like the Bencher can.
And if you’re careful, you can adjust the Brown to be just as narrowly spaced as the Bencher, and just as responsive. I don’t have a lot of problems with the Bencher paddles getting knocked around, but it does happen. I’ll probably run the Brown iambic for a while, though I have no shortage of iambic keys, straight keys and bugs to put on the air, hi hi!
MON-KEYING AROUND. While digging around in the attic and the main shack, I’ve located — so far — four Mon-Key electronic keyers. One of those for is packed with its original sales folder, invoice, box and instructions. One of the four actually fires up, but all you get is a hum through the speaker. I suspect it needs electrolytics. Another one has orange drop caps installed to replace the old originals; the tube filaments don’t light.
I have one Mon-Key that was modified in the manner I wish to modify several of the other Mon-Keys — they replaced the resistive power cord with a regular cord, then installed high wattage resistors to drop the voltage in the same manner as the resistive line cord did. The modified one works like a champ.
I haven’t put a Monk-Key on the air yet, but I really want to.
ATTIC EXCAVATION PART 9. Mixed with boxes of my radio gear, I’ve been discovering boxes of my son’s and daughters childhood stuff. My daughter, the artist, has boxes of Beanie Babies, artwork, all sorts of stuff. I’ve had to rebox some of it because the original cardboard boxes have deteriorated.
On the plus side, I discovered an Astron RS-35 power supply; I located my Hallicrafters SX-101A receiver; I found a box marked Heathkit HW-16 that looks too big to be just a HW-16; I also found a Lafayette HA-350 receiver; there’s another box marked National NCX-500, but I’m hoping its really a National NC-300 receiver, hi hi (I swear I bought one 15 years ago and never unboxed it … I have plenty of attic left to search, so here’s hoping)!
One thing I’ve not located yet is a Flex 3000 HF transceiver. I’m not sure where it went, but I’m hoping to locate that radio soon as well. We’ll see.
73 es CUL … de KY4Z … SK …. SK ….. (dit dit) ….