BKG FOR CLUBS
This page is spelled correctly. That is the only concession we are making.
The rest of bkg.club is written the way we talk on the air at two in the morning, but "get ur brass on the air!!" does not survive a board meeting. So here is the gang in plain language, and what it costs to find out: about thirty dollars, less than your club spends on coffee.
Not "grow the club," not "sell shirts," not "win anything." More operators on 144 MHz sending Morse code than there were last year.
Everything else here is a second-order effect, and those are why your club should care.
โก THE THREE SECOND-ORDER EFFECTS โก
Outside a few repeaters and a net or two, two meters goes days without a signal. The weak-signal end goes weeks.
An active band is far easier to defend than an empty one. Every contact is evidence, and it costs you an evening.
The barrier is fear, not skill. Nobody's first soldering job belongs inside a thirteen-hundred-dollar HF rig, so the iron stays in the drawer and the hobby becomes shopping.
Nobody's hands shake over a thirty-dollar handheld. When the worst case is ordering another, people try things, and people who try things build things.
With a handheld and a modest antenna, 2-meter CW is a local mode. Your contacts are not strangers a thousand miles away. They are people close enough to have breakfast with.
So you cannot grow in this gang without meeting the hams around you: back to your local club, talk friends into modifying a radio, get on the air together. The recruiting mechanism is, by physics, community building.
THE NR7Y MODS AND FIRMWARE
This is what lets a club run a build night instead of a lecture.
The Quansheng UV-K1 is a thirty-dollar handheld that, out of the box, will not send CW at all.
We point clubs at the K1 for one reason: predictability. The older UV-K5 shipped in several revisions that are hard to tell apart before you buy, each needing different firmware. The K1 is one known target: order five radios, get five identical radios. That matters in a room full of soldering irons.
NR7Y wrote the CW firmware. On the K1 it builds on F4HWN's Fusion codebase, which descends from egzumer's and DualTachyon's original open-source work. It makes the radio a real CW transceiver: actual carrier keying, not a tone whistled into an FM microphone.
- Keying
- High-speed RX/TX switching, fast enough to send and hear in real time.
- Keyer
- Automatic iambic keyer (modes A, B, Ultimatic and Bug) with adjustable speed in WPM.
- Sidetone
- Adjustable sidetone volume, including off, for those who prefer to suffer.
- The modification
- Two resistors off, two jumpers on, custom firmware in. A standard paddle then plugs straight in: no adapter, no special cable.
- Messages
- Record messages by keying them in, then play them back: your call, your exchange, a CQ you do not send by hand forty times an activation.
- Code practice
- A non-transmitting practice mode, so a new operator learns on the radio they will use on the air. It will even send with the flashlight LED.
- Flashing
- Prebuilt files with every release, nothing to compile. uvtools2 is the easiest way to get them onto the radio.
- A working 2m CW rig for the price of a large pizza.
- A build night that ends with something that works.
- An excuse to teach flashing, keying and antennas in one evening.
- Members who have opened a radio and lived to tell about it.
- The author's own warning: the mod changes hardware behavior significantly, with no guarantee against damage. Use at your own risk.
- Back up the radio's calibration data with uvtools2 right after flashing.
- CHIRP needs the dedicated driver that ships with each release. Download them together.
- Buy the K1, not the original UV-K5: this firmware does not run on the older radio.
The honest version: this is a modified cheap radio, not a weak-signal station, and it behaves like one. That is the point. Nobody learns from equipment they are afraid to open, and if a member destroys one, the club is out thirty dollars and up one member who has seen the inside of a radio.
RUNNING THIS AT YOUR CLUB
No committee, no budget line, no vote. One evening and about a hundred dollars: three radios and a spare.
Start small enough that failure is boring. Three UV-K1s and a cable is a rounding error in most treasuries, and enough to prove the idea or kill it.
One laptop, one cable, an hour. Recruit the members who have never flashed anything. They are the audience. Watching someone's face when their handheld reboots into something they changed is the actual product.
Lift two resistors, add two jumpers, and the key input is live. Steadiest hands on the first one, everyone else crowded around. This is what the evening is about: somebody changing a circuit rather than a setting, probably for the first time.
Pick a night, put the club on 144.025, and run it slow enough for the newest operator. QRS is a feature, not an apology: 5 WPM counts as much as 25.
Work a non-member on 2m CW and that is a recruit. Confirm they want in, then send in the contact. They get a BKG number and appear on the downline under whoever pounded them in. Clubs turn that into a leaderboard. We are not going to stop you.
THE GROWN-UP PARAGRAPH
We describe ourselves as a law-abiding, FCC-respecting gang, and we mean the second part as sincerely as we mean the first.
Operate inside your privileges and your band plan. The gang calls on 144.025 MHz, at the CW and weak-signal end of 2 meters. That end is shared with EME, so the courtesies matter: listen first, send QRL? (Bylaw III, and this is what it was written for), and move if somebody is working. Outside the United States, check your national band plan.
Modifying a radio is your call and your consequence. The mod is well-trodden and the radios are cheap, but you own the outcome, warranty and certification included. Modify your own radio, or one whose owner is standing next to you saying yes.
Membership is voluntary, every time. Confirm someone wants in before you submit them. A surprise membership is not a gift; it is paperwork.
73 de BKG ๐ค๐ก