Tony Boddy VK6DQ – The creator of the Club’s Mega Key.
I used to live in Christchurch with the call of ZL3DQ. 1988 was the year we left for Australia to be closer to family over there. The last ZL callbook I have is also from 1988. I figured it would be a good one to keep to remind me of the Hams I knew and perhaps after the move may never see again. If nothing else, that has worked. Dave ZL3FJ and I have been corresponding on and off for many years via the internet. Last year Dave emailed me a picture of a giant size Morse key. That brought back a few memories. Mind you my old memory bank has a few holes in it now. I built that key back in the mid eighties, a lifetime ago.
The club had some sort of a do on, can’t for the life of me remember what it was for but the key was built for a CW competition. The beam is built from an off cut of 4×2 about a meter long. It was salvaged from a building site and the base was made from some old Rimu Shelving that I was using to rebuild our kitchen cupboards. A bit of electroniky stuff in the middle and I had a CPO (Code Practice Oscillator) of very dubious quality. The idea was to convince some of our gun CW operators to have a go at a “real” Morse key. They did too. What they did not know was that with a secret switch I could switch the key out of the circuit intermittently to make it was impossible to send coherent Morse.
A lot of hams would reckon that all Morse was incoherent. In the eighties there were two factions in Amateur radio, the HF buffs and the VHFer’s. Both factions were autonomous and as far as I could tell would never meet on common ground without some form of animosity.
Seemed a bit silly to me after all we were all amateur radio operators. HF operation required proficiency with Morse code because it was an international requirement for maritime safety purposes. You never know when you may be called by a ships operator for help if his ship should be
in trouble and all he could use was code. A very valid reason for knowing code and also a mode that I found pleasant to use. There were some who wanted to do the HF bit and others who would never do anything with Morse code so they were not allowed on HF.
Author Tony Boddy VK6DQ