K1EL keyer kit

Kit building is a time proven amateur radio tradition. The golden era was during the days of Heathkit, a company that sold kits ranging from simple testing gear to complete transceivers.

The advent of large integration, surface mouted components and complex circuits somewhat cast this tradition aside but the recent times have seen a comeback.

The most emblematic case is Elecraft, that sells one of the best transceivers in the market today in kit form. But there are also other interesting kits on the market.

Searching for a way to transmit CW at my remote station using a key at my end, I was brought attention to a piece of software called wkremote by K1EL. It uses two winkey keyers on a back to back configuration, one at each side of the connection. I will write more about it on a future post.

Since I already have a winkey keyer at the radio end (a microham microkeyer II), I needed just one additional winkey keyer. here comes K1EL, who sells great keyers as kits.

I ordered a winkeyer USB kit and soon it arrived. The kit is complete and easy to assemble, I completed it on a sunday afternoon, and I am not a very experienced builder.

The keyer is great, with memmories and fully configurable. It takes power from the USB connection or, when used as standalone, from 2 AAA batteries.

The instructions are complete and detailed. The best of building it was the sense of pride when I first fired it and it worked perfectly.

Amateur radio at its best!