[CQ-Contest] Which QUERTY Keyboard?

Tim Shoppa tshoppa at gmail.com
Thu Sep 17 12:47:55 EDT 2015


> Prefer a small footprint, what do you use?

My favorite keyboard by far, is the good old IBM Model M "clicky key"
keyboard. However, it is by no measure a small footprint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard

What I currently use at home, is a "Ducky Zero" keyboard with Cherry Blue
clicky keyswitches. It is not nearly as big as a Model M but is still
"regular size":  http://www.duckychannel.com.tw/en/ZERO_DK2108.html

If you go to a computer store and look at gaming keyboads, they often use
the Cherry nomenclature of "Blue" for clicky keyswitches, "Brown" for
tactile bumpy keyswitches, and "Red" or "Black" for keyswitches with no
tactile feedback.

Many mini-keyboards lack independent function keys and you have to use a
function-shift to get to the F1, F2, F4, etc. keys. Big bummer for common
contest logger usage.

In the RTTY mailing list, W0YK recommended the BTC 9118 as a mini-keyboard
that still retains the important logger function keys. I understand that he
uses multiple of these keyboards, one for each radio/computer!

Tim N3QE


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