[CQ-Contest] Mods to MFJ-432 Voice Keyer?

[kl7ra]

Henry Pollock - K4TMC writes:


>Contesters,
>
>In reviewing lessons-learned from this past weekend's CQWW, I need to make
>some mods to the MFJ-432 voice keyer.  Has anyone had any success with
>replacing the 4 red message switches?  They do not always work the first time
>you push on them


Really good switches are hard to find. We all went through this many years ago
with CW memory keyers. The best I found were from the hardware store, not
electronic parts houses. They had a display of switches and I found one style
that was easy to push and worked everytime. The best switch however was a
design using a 555 IC that required just my finger touching a conductor. The
circuit  was taken from the Month/Year touch pad of a Heathkit clock.

Another idea is to use your logging program to select the msg. TRLog allows
this and I'm sure the others do as well. Here is a simple Radio Shack circuit
that might help: http://www.qth.com/tr/mfj432.html

>And, has anyone found a connector that fits the remote terminal pins on the
>back?

I talked to one of the fellows at MFJ about their poor selection of  the IDC 5.
I have changed one of my keyers to Din5 which is easy to do. You can find
those connectors in old PCs along the board edges.

>OK, I know some of you will just say - get rid of it and get the
>MFJ-434, or something else.


Not at all, I used three MFJ 432s during the WW contest and they worked fine.
They did change the 432 design however. The later versions replaced the PTT
relay with a FET.


73  Rich KL7RA



--
CQ-Contest on WWW:        http://lists.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests:  cq-contest-REQUEST at contesting.com