Hi all,

I'm Luc ON7DQ (KF0CR), I live in Ostend, Belgium.

I retired in 2016, after a career of teaching at Ostend Polytechnic.

I ran a school club (ON4HTI) for 21 years, introducing many of my students to ham radio and homebrewing.

The most popular actvity was our participation in the School Club Roundup each year.

Our most popular homebrew project was the Neophyte Receiver from QST, but I think these days that would have to be a simple SDR receiver (Softrock, µSDX-RX, etc).

 

In the Ostend Radio Club, I regularly give presentations about antenna's, transmission lines, SOTA, etc.

My most popular talk was about the nanoVNA, it's on my YouTube channel , but unfortunatley, it's only available in Dutch.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfDSl8KkGvM)

The slides are available in English though, in the nanoVNA group (https://groups.io/g/nanovna-users/files/Presentations/20191220_ON7DQ_NanoVNA_Presentation_English%20V2.03.pdf)

 

Since I retired, I do a lot of homebrewing, SOTA & WWFF activations, and have regained interest in CW operating (member of SKCC, NAQCC and NTC).

And I am a technical coach of groups of kids age 10-11 in what we call the "STEM Academy".

What surprises me each time is that these kids are especially attracted to Morse Code ... despite all their smartphones, tablets or game consoles.

 

As we had nothing better to do during the Covid-19 crisis, I got the help of a local club member (who is a better programmer than me), to develop a nice project : 

I think this would be a nice project for a school club, it mixes Arduino with some analog electronics, ... and Morse Code of course.
It's not a "one afternoon" project, but with care and guidance, it can be done by anyone who can hold a soldering iron.

 

See the "demo box" that I built, it contains all possible options of this project, but a much simpler version can also be built.

There is a 50 page English manual which describes all the details.

All software, manuals, PCB files, ...  are available on these two github pages:

https://github.com/on7dq/OST-Morse-Box for a basic version

and 

https://github.com/on7dq/OST-Morse-Box-DG for an extended version, adding a decoder and a basic sine wave generator.
And soon to come on my YouTube channel : 4 videos in English, describing all features of our project.

 

I hope you can forgive my "sneaky publicity" here ... if you have any questions about this project, send me a private mail to my QRZ.com address, not via this thread.

 

73 and stay safe,

Luc ON7DQ