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Monday, December 26, 2016

Inexpensive Way to Power ON/OFF a Station Accessory

Bert, N8NN, recently added a microHAM microKEYER II to his station.  In doing so he discovered a minor issue which he needed to solve regarding how to turn the microKEYER II on and off.  Bert uses a Yaesu FT-1000mp which conveniently has a 12 volt DC connector on the back to power small accessories but he needed to make a slight modification to allow that to turn his microKEYER II ON/OFF.  Here are Bert's comments:
"The Yaesu 12 volt DC output accessory connector on the back does not have adequate current capacity to power the microKEYER, and there is a caution in the microKEYER manual to not use it to power the microKEYER.  I power the microKEYER from a 1.2 amp wall wart.  The problem is that the on/off switch for the microKEYER is on the back of the box, hard to reach.  I don’t want to leave the microKEYER powered all the time, so I needed a relay to turn on the microKEYER when the Yaesu is powered up.  I found the perfect relay on Amazon at 

I put the circuit board in a small plastic box, powered the board from the Yaesu 12 volt accessory jack and cut the wall wart positive lead to insert the relay contacts.  Problem solved.  Photo attached."
This relay board only cost $5.39 from Amazon!  Bert found a super inexpensive way to control the turning on and off of his microKEYER II.  Nice job, Bert!