Very good,
Dutch guys live with their feet at or below sea level.
A paddle is so expensive because the adjustments may not change over constant temperature in the shack nor may the contacts need cleaning often, and the movement of the paddlecontacts must be minimal in the order of 1 mil, and that distance must be stable over time, according to K7QO and that is a guy that is the fastest in CW in the States, and not a dumbo because he is a retired astrophysicist.
So "Let your fingers do the talking" (not on a PC keyboard
), but with paddles.
It is told that guys such as Begali sneaky copied a home made design of the East European HST world champion in sending, and sells it as "Silver Bullshit" or something. Year later all the guys at HST are provided with a free sample and asked them to place a demonstration on You Tube.
Well, when you want a paddle with the above mentioned specifications, it is quite easy to realise with a set of pressure sensitive resistor pads.
Don't believe that you can transmit with the speed of your $1000 paddles.,base made of titanium lithium palladium, silver contacts gold plated, base with a coating of secret components (as dried up Coca Cola also is) and made piece by piece (not 100 equal pieces at a row) by an old craftsman, glasses hanging with a cord around his neck, with incomparable (with competition) love for his products, limited edition, numbered, and with the signature of the designer engraved?
Look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U68U7jlnt-I for an extreme simple pressure sensitive resistance pad.
and tell us here whether or not you reach that level with your expensive paddle.
Better sell it before everybody agrees that the king is naked.
Bob PAoBLAH
P.S. Somewhere I read the story that the pressure of paddles must be adjustable independently of each other, very important blah blah just as my vanity call sign suffix. Somewhere else on you tube I found a video of adjusting with a Newton meter the pressure and adjusting them very precisely with a resolution of 0.0001 N per division to the same amount.
KB3REV wrote on
www.lcwo.net:
"For the price of some unetched copper covered plain circuitboards, you can make your own inexpensive paddles that are actually quite usable, and compare in functionality and feel to much more epensive paddles. It should take just an hour or two, and you can use them with your rig's encoder. I just built a single paddle yesterday and it works great! Good fun!
The board is $4.49, or 3.49 euros, which will give you enough materials for several paddles. You'll need a little more for some brass (steel would do, but is not as pretty) screws, but the whole this will be less than 10 dollars/euros.
Here's one source of the "how to:"
http://www.amqrp.org/projects/paddle/NB6M%20Paddles.html, and Here's a US source of the boards:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102495. "
gd luck
