[TenTec] True QSK?

[Lee Crocker]

I built my first "QSK" amp in about 1981.  I was made
from the junk I could scrounge from the surplus stores
and hamfests in Chicago.  I was running an Atlas 350XL
which had pretty good QSK.  The Amp was 4-811's with
way too much voltage on the plates.  I made the relay
out of a bunch (around 12)of parallel surplus glass
vaccuum reeds that I wound a common coil for, and used
a circuit that forward biased and reversed biased the
coil, until it had a couple of msec of transfer time. 
The problem like Doug explains was the noise.  It
sounded like an M-60 machine gun.  It was so loud I
couldn't hear the side tone even with headphones.  All
that was missing was flashing blue haze of some
mercury vapor rectifiers, winking in time with the
dits.  

That was the year I discovered PIN diodes

73 W9OY

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