For Tom, and anyone else who has become curious about this subject 
after hearing that amazing combination of chirp and very raw note that 
I posted:

Until Novice operators could use the full featured rigs such as the 
Kenwood TS520 and Yaesu FT101, the way most of us monitored our CW 
signal as Novices was to simply not mute the receiver, and back the RF 
gain control down to a very low setting when transmitting. Thus, we 
heard our transmitter more or less as it sounded to everybody else. I 
say more or less because if you happened to have a ground loop, or let 
your receiver get overloaded by your transmitted signal, you could get 
some false indications that were really problems which were local to 
your shack, and were not actually being transmitted for the rest of 
the world to hear.

The Heath HW16 Novice transceiver had a built in side tone for 
monitoring purposes, but that side tone sounded pretty awful. To clean 
up that problem, many people simply removed the neon bulb from the 
side tone circuit, and were then able to monitor the HW16 transmitter 
through the receiver. This also made it easier to get the receiver and 
transmitter on the same frequency.

There were also numerous circuits which were designed specifically as 
external CW monitors. My mention of finding one of those solid state 
ice cube size monitors from the late 1960s a few months ago prompted a 
few messages on this list about various monitor circuits.







Mike Duke, K5XU
American Council of Blind Radio Amateurs