HamGadgets News

Things have been crazy busy around here for a few weeks now. I’m trying to keep caught up on shipping orders, but to be honest I am frequently falling a couple of days behind – so if your order doesn’t ship immediately, I apologize in advance.

I will soon be shipping Rev B of the ID-O-Matic II. No big changes, just a couple of component values are different and a couple of minor PCB errors corrected. I’ve also started introducing pre-assembled kits, beginning with the PicoKeyer-Plus. I plan to add the UKA-2 and ID-O-Matic II in the near future.

And lastly, one of the reasons we’ve been so busy: Say hello to Burke Thomas Wissman, our first grandchild!  He was born this afternoon.  Mom and baby are doing fine, but everyone involved (including grandparents) are exhausted.  Now, I’m going to grab a quick nap and finish a couple of furniture refinishing projects so the nursery can be ready!

Ain't he cute?

If you have an ID-O-Matic II, please check for an updated manual.  The original version (100227) had a couple of errors.  The schematic diagram was incorrect, and the table on p. 5-6 showing the terminal block connections was wrong.  The corrected manual is here.  My apologies for any confusion.

After a 17-hour day on Saturday and another 8 hours on Sunday, I now have all of the ID-O-Matic II backorders filled and shipped.  I also have all orders placed while I was gone last week on their way.  As of this morning I’m current on all shipping, just waiting on the MasterKeyer boards so I can start shipping those.  With any luck I’ll have all of those cleared out by the end of the week as well.

So…  as of now, we’re back to normal.  If you place an order for anything other than a MasterKeyer it will be shipped within a day or so as usual.  MK-1 orders will ship in the order they were received, starting later this week.

Today I posted the documentation for the ID-O-Matic II, built the first unit using a production PCB, and finished the last few tweaks to the firmware.  I’ll be bagging kits this weekend to start shipping Monday.  Pictures of the assembled kit and a link to the documentation in PDF format are now available on the web site.

I managed to fix a couple of firmware issues that had been bugging me, mostly centered around the new PWM audio and code speed.  I now have everything working well, though I did have to lower the upper limit on audio frequency to 2500 Hz.  The original ID-O-Matic would allow audio tones up to 5 kHz, but that was the result of a request for a special application.  I believe the vast majority of users will be perfectly happy with an audio range of 250-2500 Hz.  I also discovered a couple of minor errors on the PCB that will be corrected in the future with Rev. B.  Only one requires cutting a trace and running one wire, and that is only needed for those keying handheld transceivers.  The other is a silkscreen marking error on the board.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been stacking up FAR more backorders than I am comfortable with.  For that, I apologize.  Demand for the MK-1 after the QST product review exceeded even my best-case assumptions, and a PCB redesign to speed up build time and increase reliability complicated matters even further.

On top of that, the design phase fo the ID-O-Matic II dragged on for a few weeks longer than I expected – meaning there was not only no overlap in availability of the two kits, I ran out of the original ID-O-Matic kits entirely. 

The good news is, I should be able to start clearing out the backorders next week (3/1).  ID-O-Matic II baords will be waiting for me when I get home from my current business trip.  The MK-1 cabinets and PCBs should be arriving shortly thereafter, and I’ll ship them as fast as I can get them assembled and thoroughly tested.  I can’t make any guarantees about how soon I will have all the backorders shipped, but rest assured it will be as soon as I can do so without sacrificing quality.  In the mean time, THANKS to all of you for hanging in there with me!