Re: uBITx intermittent cw transmit
Howard Fidel
Joe: Take your voltmeter and monitor the voltage at the blue wire pin 2 on the Raduino. It should be ~ 0 volts when the key is pressed and +5V when not pressed. If it isn't you have a wiring issue, if it is possible Raduino issue. Howard
On 8/17/2018 3:15 PM, Joe Milosch wrote:
Hi, I recently built my ubitx, and after assembling it received perfectly. I just got my HAM license, so I decided to see how the cw key function worked. There seems to be a problem. I am using the stock software which came with my July 2018 delivered ubitx. The PTT function works perfectly, just the slightest ground puts the ubitx into Tx voice mode. With CW, the story is different. First, the instructions are pretty shoddy, and only because I could trace the wires from pictures in some setup instructions was I able to figure out the wiring to the various 1/8'' female connector sockets. I found there was no mention of the keyer socket PIN 3 connection to the yellow ground wire of the Arduino, and it seems that I needed to make a wire jumper to connect the keyer socket ground to the Arduino yellow wire at PIN 4, the Arduino ground. I guess they assumed a metal chassis would make the connection? I have a plastic chassis. So OK, got that glitched fixed and I fully expected it to work. I had 5 volts connected to the 4.7k resistor, and the blue and green wire connections were correct. When I tried to key, nothing happened. I thought it might be a dirty straight key, so I tried monmentarily jumpering the blue wire to ground. It correctly went from 5v to 0v on each contact. Now this is the weird part. If I repeatedly touched the blue wire to Arduino ground ( yellow wire ), the cw tx mode would suddenly start, with TX power and proper sidetone, then suddenly stop. There is no pattern to trigger it. If I repeatedly touched and shorted the blue to yellow ground, I would randomly get a burst of dits and dahs, then it would stop. I could repeat this over and over, but without finding a definite pattern. I thought maybe the Arduino board had a bad solder joint, or some other intermittent problem, but I'm also wondering if the stock software is flawed in the cw portion, and the Arduino is having a hard time detecting the voltage drop of the key. Before I go any further in ripping this thing apart, I would hope one of the ubitx experts can provide an answer to this. Thank You, Joe Milosch, KN4OND, Mauk, GA, USA
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