I am starting to think about Field Day 2013. Part of that is working through the various gear & antenna choices which is pretty simple with the 2012 addition of an Elecraft KX3.

I started thinking about how I want to handle keyboard CW & PSK this year without having to bring along a netbook or laptop. Being able to send the QSO exchange with a keyboard makes life much more comfortable & enjoyable.

I am exploring using an Arduino (aka: AVR) as the potential back bone of the keyer interface for CW & PSK31.

A screen capture showing a partial keyer demo

I hooked up a small speaker to an Arduino Nano and generated a tone in a couple of minutes. It took about another 10 minutes to variablize some code. From there I built a Dit & Dah Function. That worked well enough that I then built a set of functions for A-Z and 0-9. So a little more than an hour from when I started I have basic morse code library built and functioning.

We will see where this goes next. I need to interface it to the KX3 and test that. After that I probably need to test hooking up a keyboard. If that all pans out I will look building some function key macros. If that all continues to work I will consider hooking up a 20x4 LCD and building a simple user interface & some feedback messages.

I am not positive that this is the route that I am really headed yet. But it was an enjoyable 60 minutes or so to produce some good sounding morse code.

73 de NG0R