"Ottar" wrote in message
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Could this be a copy of the Heathkit keyer from the mid seventies ?

Nope. I think the Heathkit had a lot less parts

It's hard to see the name of the chips and my guess is TTL's.

I blew up the picture and I *think* I saw 4401 and 4013. For a while there
CMOS parts were all the rage in keyers.

Or keep the nicely made mechanical work in the cabinet and put in brand
new
keyer guts? This may be the least expensive of all.

The mechanical work really is nice, isn't it. These days you can replace
the whole works with a TiCK or any of a hundred TiCK clones, or better yet,
stick in a PIC and roll your own logic so you get the feature set you want.

I think the bottom-end TiCK chip is around ten bucks. All it needs is a
power supply, which can be a watch battery, and a keying transistor, which
is probably already there ... maybe the supply, too. For a few more bucks
you can add all sorts of features, either through higher end TiCK's
(www.bright.net/~kanga/kanga) or Island Keyer (www.morsex.com), or the K1EL
keyer (www.k1el.com), or .. or ... or ...

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