I have picked up a few things ham related lately, nothing earth-shattering, but all contribute to my overall joy.

I got a greatly upgraded mobile antenna, a Comet SBB-7NMO. Comet’s website is not particularly friendly to highlighting one particular item, but the SBB-7NMO is a 2m/70cm mobile antenna. In 2m, it is a 4.5dBi gain 6/8 wave center-loaded vertical and in 70cm, it’s three stacked phased 5/8 waves for 7.2dBi gain. That’s not that much less than my 10 foot tall Diamond base antenna. With it on a magnetic base stuck on the roof of my truck, I was able to hit two of the three Decatur repeaters from downtown Fort Worth, about 40 miles, with 5W from an ID-51. Yep, 40 miles on an HT, from street level surrounded by tall buildings. I will continue testing.

I also got a replacement adapter/jumper to connect that ID-51 to my mobile amplifier. The one I have now has developed a poor connection in or near the SMA end. Most likely, it came from being yanked on when the cable snags on something while lifting the radio up to use it. The new 6 foot long one will be less subject to this shock as it will be long enough to allow me to move the amplifier to a better spot behind the seat.

Actually, I ordered two of these cables, but one of them arrived, properly labeled from the manufacturer, but with the wrong cable in the package. I am confident HRO will make it right.

I also got a copy of the ARRL Operating Manual, which I have wanted for a long time but finally ordered it. When I studying to get my license back, I found there were a lot of modes and operational procedures that didn’t even exist when I had my previous license. More on that later.

In a starburst of extreme irony, I traded off a nice set of Vibroplex paddles and then, almost immediately, decided I would like to get back into Morse code and was thus forced to buy a set of Vibroplex paddles. To the outside observer, it might look like I decided to go with a smaller, more portable set to include in my RemoteRig bag. Yeah, let’s go with that for now…

I haven’t suffered from any guilt over my no-code license. I studied hard and in a way that wasn’t just memorizing the questions. I took and passed the Technician, General and Extra tests in one sitting. I understand how operators who earned their licenses before 2007 might lament that Morse code proficiency is no longer required to get a license. One particular friend passed his 20 wpm code test, but was not ready for the written test until after February, 2007, at which time his hard won code element certificate was no longer needed.

The old timers can sometimes make it seem that they consider us, as a class of licensee anyway, to be a lesser hams. Most often, the argument comes across as “back in our day” and “these kids today have it too easy” with a little “get off my lawn” seeping through. They grouse about how all a ham has to do now is be good at taking a test, a test for which you can literally memorize most of the answers and guess the rest.

However, in listening to some local repeater conversations recently, one particular explanation crystallized the real issue for me and it’s one I can definitely identify in myself. Whether it was intended to do so or not, the Morse code proficiency requirement of old allowed hams to become more rounded and experienced operators during the time it took to become proficient in the next higher Morse code speed requirement.

I think was a fairly well rounded Novice by the time I got my Technician ticket. That was 7 years of admittedly intermittent operating during which I operated CW (slowly and not very well) on HF because that’s all I had available to me on HF. I participated in club Field Days. I went to swap meets. I learned how a Teletype Model 28 works. I wrote Morse code sending software for the Commodore 64 and tried to make receive work with a home brew LM-567 board. Once Novices and Technicians were granted some phone privileges on 10 meters, I tried a bit of that, but our rented duplex wasn’t very well suited to putting a dipole up high enough to work well and thus 10 meters was good for little more than chatting around the neighborhood, or would have been if I’d had some ham neighbors on 10 meters.

Once I had that Technician ticket, I was on VHF FM and packet a lot, toyed with microwaves a little and made more antennas, some of which mostly worked. I continued studying Morse code and tried to get my speed up but I couldn’t seem to get over that 10 wpm plateau. That may have contributed to cooling on the hobby.

Fast forward to 2011, more than a decade after I had participated so little in the hobby that my license had expired, and all I needed to do to get it back with the maximum privileges available to any US ham was answer a bunch of multiple choice questions about rules, electronics and radio theory. So here I am, an Extra class licensee with the 20-years-stale experience level of a Technician.

Ok, I get it now.

So, I mentioned the new paddles. I truly did get interested in Morse code again almost immediately after trading off the other paddles. I suppose it was because it was a subject under much discussion at the time. I also found that there are a lot of contests that award weighted points for CW, if you are into that. But all that was before the epiphany about “earning” my class rather than just passing the test for it. Now I’m determined to be a better operator and I think that includes proficiency in Morse code. So I ordered two Gordon West Morse code courses, the 0-5 wpm and the 5-16 wpm courses. I hope that I have forgotten enough Morse code to not be encumbered by old bad habits.

The Code Warrior Jr is equipped with classy looking paddles made of what appears to be clear acrylic sheet. As supplied, the edges of these paddles are fairly sharp. It looks great, but is not very comfortable to the touch.

I will either replace or modify these, sooner or later. I am a woodworker as well and I have a fair bit of African blackwood or mesquite that would look great there. At the very least, I can take the bitey edges off the plastic.

I will wire it with a standard 3.5mm plug. Natively, the paddle input to the RemoteRig takes that connector. I will be able to use an also standard 3.5mm to 1/4″ headphone adapter to allow me to plug it directly into my IC-706mkIIg, but I’ll need an external keyer for the Kenwood. I might also wire an adapter to let me plug it into the IC-706’s mic jack. In CW mode, the mic up and down buttons can be reassigned as dit and dah inputs for the built in keyer and the manual shows how to connect external paddles for this. Icom cleverly uses a resistor in series with each paddle switch to detect dit, dah or a squeeze for both with a single input and ground.

By this connection, I can use the IC-706’s head on the separation cable without having to run the paddles all the way to the back of the rig. This would most likely come up only in certain operational situations, such as Field Day in the camper where I might not want to run the antenna, ground and power all the way up on to the little table that I will doubtlessly be operating from.

RemoteRig CW operation looks to be pretty well thought out, if a little weird. The Control end can accept either a straight key or, with its built in iambic keyer, a paddle. The problem they must solve is that CW keying is a pretty much real time immediate thing, but the key and the actual radio are separated by a potentially jittery and latency delayed LAN/WAN. RemoteRig uses a couple of settings to let your CW string be sent over the network and reconstructed on the fly at the radio end and thus transmit nice readable code. Working on the LAN at home, jitter and latency will be minimal, or at least I expect it to be consistent.