Please chime in and show us a picture
of your vintage cw keyboard
commercial or homebrew
KF7CX
Here’s a picture of my HAL MKB-1 keyboard. I built it from a kit back in 1975 when it sold for around $175. It was my favorite keyboard for about 25 years until I got a K1EL K20. As you can see there is no spacebar due to no buffering. If you held a key down long enough it would repeat the character. That could be an advantage for sending certain words, but getting off of the E key quickly enough could be a challenge at high speeds. The keyboard still works, but it would take me a few days of practice to be able to send on it at a good speed. Back in the good old days, I could send over 60 wpm on it.
Below here is a picture of my SkipJack - sold by the ECM Corporation
SkipJack 48B keyboard keyer that was sold as a kit in the late 1970
KF7CX, SkipJack internals
KZ0D
The ACCU-MILL project was developed by a young brilliant MIT graduate and I can recall purchasing the PROMs and PC board from him.It used a Standard ASCII style keyboard ( Provided by the user ) to the input to of his circuit board. His circuit was a ROM look table ( TWO Proms ) that provided an output to the famous ACCU-Keyer. It was amazing what some of the hams used as keyboards back then. I recall folks using the old Radio Shack TRS 80 computers for CW. The Commodore VIC-20 was also used to blast out CW. HeathKit made a CW keyboard - Marty (KW1C ) has one of these boards. There was a CW keyboard made by HAL. K0JVX - John, still uses his old SkipJack keyboard. Back in 1999 WA2TDL - Rick, was still using his Woody (K4KN) Keyboard.
K0PFX
Info-Tech M-300C
My first keyboard was one called a Skipjack. After that I got an Info-Tech M-300 and then an update of that one, the M-300C by Info-Tech. The first board my dad had was an Info-Tech M-300 and the M-300C later.
These were originally designed and built here in St Louis (Westport) just a few miles from my house. Info Tech later moved to Florida just north of where my Dad, W4BI lived. Info Tech supplied Universal Radio in Ohio with not only keyboards but many digital mode decoding boxes for SWLs and some of the first RTTY TUs with CRTs. Info Tech is no longer in business. Dave Kelce was the founder of the company and a ham, K0DGF. The 300 and 300C were popular with the CFO because they sent very good CW, had a space bar and recallable memories. The 300 had individual key switches which were not as reliable as one piece keyboard assembly on the 300C but switches could be easily replaced. Both boards used an 8 bit Fairchild 1802 processor and I think had around 4kbyte of memory. Since it was "all digital," it had no speed knob but controlled using Control M keys followed by the numbers for the speed and finally, the return key. Its default speed/power up speed was very slow maybe around 10-12 wpm which was frustrating for the QRQ operator! When my dad picked up his second 300C, Info Tech used his call sign., W4BI for the serial number. :-)
WA2TDL
The K4KN KEYBOARD
When i was trying to improve my cw speed in 1975, i managed to obtain a k4kn keyboard from a w5 fella - sure wish i could remember his call now - and so needless to say i was thrilled. imagine finding out that such great cw ops like k4kht, gene, and w9lrv(k5hib)ken were using the same morse keyboard to pound out the music as i now had. sure has been fun using the "woody", K4KN keyboard !
FROM K1LKP about the k4kn, "woody", keyboard creator:
Chuck aa0hw
A-TRONIX CW KEYBOARD
info here:
https://www.n7cfo.com/Tgph/Dwnlds/atronix.pdf
May 18, 2019
Chuck aa0hw
discussion about this keyboard on QRZ
1970s HOMEBREW KEYBOARD discussion
Aug 13, 2019
Chuck aa0hw
Morse-A-Keyer CW keyboard
Apr 20, 2021