I have been on the hunt for a quality keyer for my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio for a long time now. You see, this radio is a bucket list item for me and I finally found one. Well, just like all Ten Tec radios, this one only has a simple keyer, with no memories to record messages like most modern radios today. I really enjoy having message memories to send CQ and even sometimes to send the closing statement at the end for a number of reasons. So enter the external keyer…
So to spoil the outcome right at the start. This keyer is just what the doctor ordered. It worked just exactly like I wanted it to. I love the form factor, the size and especially the functionality. It has so much going on that I had no idea was there, like it has macros… kinda. It has these short hand codes that will call up other memories or repeat information or trigger other functions. One that is really neat is that you can change the keying speed with a command embedded in the memory message, so say your in a contest and you want to send the 599 BK really faster as literally everyone is using this exchange. Then you can add a small command at the beginning to change the speed of the message to say, something like 35WPM, then send the exchange and at the end execute another command to change the speed back to what the knob on the front is set for. This works, I tried it. On top of that, it will do serialized messages too! This little keyer is loaded!
Below is what you get when you buy it. The widget and a slip of paper with the info on where the manual is online. I downloaded the manual and promptly printed it out. The manual is well done, easy to understand and also has the assembly instruction as apparently this can be had in kit form too.
The front of the keyer has 4 buttons and the speed control knob, that’s it. It has everything you need and nothing you dont. Plain as that.
Another thing that I kept going back to was just how small and light it is. It weighs practically nothing and is about the size of a pack of playing cards cut in half… As for the buttons, there are things these do other than record and playback memories. By pressing multiple keys together, you can do all sorts of other things, like go into the menu, or set it for tune up mode where it will send a constant carrier so you can set the tuner for the antenna and so fourth.
The back is even simpler. The sockets are as follows: left to right, The headphone Jack for use as a practice oscillator, the paddle / straight key input, and then the output used for keying the radio. By the way, this thing even auto detects the keying device and sets itself to the right mode for you somehow. That is some serious dark magic right there.
These are the screws you will remove to replace the battery…next year. It is supposed to last that long, we shall see as I plan to use this radio a lot more now that I have a memory keyer for it.
You will see below that I had to adapt the cable going to the Argonaut 5. This is because the output is setup to send to the radio as a straight key. (I am pretty sure my other keyers were the same way and I simply forgot this little fact.) So you have to set your radio to straight key mode and then come up with a 3.5mm mono to 3.5mm mono cable. Well I didn’t have a cable so I used one of my headphone adapters that turns stereo headphones to mono headphones and it went right to work. I will most likely get the right cable pretty soon, but for now this will get me by just fine.
When I had the keyer setup in the shack at home, it performed flawlessly and I was able to get it programmed and used it to chase some DX as well as hunt a bunch of POTA activators before deploying it.
As soon as I got to the park and setup, it went nuts on me. The code had this odd “modulated” kind of thing going on and was unusable. So now what???
Turns out this coax was my problem…well not this coax in particular but the fact that it was so short. You see, the antenna was connected directly to the back of the tuner so the RF was in close proximity to the radio. I speculated that this might be the problem so I got in the support box and found another cable that was longer and spread the radio set out as far as possible. This solved the problem for the most part. I think that some RF choking on the cable going to the radio will help more too.
I also included my common mode choke since this cable is BNC on one end to get rid of that possible problem. This also required me to convert the connector on the radio from SO-239 to BNC.
The radio performed very well at this point and I was able to secure an activation pretty easily even though there was heavy fading with the bands on this day. I could literally hear a 599+20dB station fade to almost nothing while copying the simple POTA exchange. It was really bad at times. If you will notice W8LEO is struck through with a 599 signal report, he called me and I never heard him again, he just vanished.
All in all, I am almost done sorting this little machine out and I am confident it will perform wonderfully on the air for many upcoming activations in the future. It is always nice to take a chance on something like this and find out it is much more than you bargained for. If you want one for yourself here is a link to the website and a screenshot of the eBay listing for reference. Hamgadgets.com Thanks and I hope to see you soon.
