Behold my score from Austin Summerfest:
I’ve had an iambic paddle on my ham radio grocery list for a while, and now I have one. I guess this means I have to get better at Morse Code to be able to use it frequently. Right?
Picked it up second-hand for about forty bucks. To make it mine, I removed the 1/4″ plug and soldered my own 1/8″ plug to make it compatible with my Yaesu FT-857. Then I tore it down and gave it a complete spit-shine with alcohol wipes, eyeglass cleaner, and a lot of polishing.
I noticed this paddle is representative of the mid-grade build quality of some MFJ products: the heavy metal base is merely chrome-plated, and some of the base has small pock-mark oxidation. The nylon insulators and pivots are a little worse for wear. Some of the adjustment screws could use a dot of threadlock to keep them from walking out of their loose tolerances. But, overall, it’s still solid and highly usable.
To operate any paddle, you simply press sideways in one direction to make a “dit” and the other to make a “dah”. What makes this “iambic” is that there are two paddles, one for dit and one for dah, and if you squeeze both at the same time, you get an automatically-generated string of “dit-dah-dit-dah-dit-dah“, much like the iambic meter you find in poetry.
The paddle itself doesn’t generate beeps. It’s just a specialized switch. You need an external keyer to take the paddle inputs and generate an output for the radio. Luckily, most radios have a keyer circuit built-in. Mine has a bunch of options like key speed and ratio between dit and dah lengths (1:3 is common).
For the record, there is no hard rule for which direction on a paddle is dit or dah. That’s up to the individual to sort out what is comfortable. Many right-handed operators choose to put dit on the left and dah on the right. It can always be reversed by crossing the connectors or using the radio’s menu if it has that option.
Now that I have all I need to send code (a paddle and a straight key), my last obstacle is myself. Knowing how to send is half the equation: I need to learn how to copy code, to hear what someone else is sending and transcribe it (speed experts do it all mentally and even recognize whole words by sound). That’s the hard part, and there’s just no way for me to do it other than with lots of listening practice.
Wish me luck.