Mike:

It's all coming back to me now..  Your first approach is exactly how I 
monitored my CW note when transmitting.  I had an old rock-bound Heath Kit 
DX35 transmitter, and a Lafayette receiver whose model number I forget, and 
made many CW qsos that way back in the day.

Thanks for jogging my memory here.

73 from Tom Behler: KB8TYJ

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Duke, K5XU" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 2:49 PM
Subject: Monitoring our CW Signal with Older Rigs


> 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
>