[Milsurplus] KY-65

[Mike Morrow]

>A KY-65 followed me home from the swap meet today. It appears to be an
>electromechanical device for sending the (numerical) aircraft ID.

The KY-65/ARA-26 is a distress keyer which keyes that attached transmitter with both S O S and the aircraft ID.  To my knowledge, the AN/ARC-65 and AN/ARC-58 HF sets were the last systems that employed the AN/ARA-26.

Most units will have spare plastic code wheels attached inside the cover, which have little teeth that are broken off as required to encode the aircraft ID.  The S O S function was premanently encoded on metal keying disks.

All know that the famous SOS distress signal is properly sent as one continuous character:

dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot

and not space-cadet style:

dot dot dot SPACE dash dash dash SPACE dot dot dot.

But the KY-65 does just that, keying SOS incorrectly as three separate characters S, O, S!

>My question is WHY this unit would be useful for ham purposes? The Morse
>coding wheels provide something like 6 numerical digits. I don't see how
>you could persuade this to be a long enough sequence for a callsign...

I don't have my KY-65 handy, but it would seem to me that there would be sufficient teeth on the encoding disk to encode most calls.  But why one would mess with this, I don't know.  And the S O S keying circuit would need to be disabled...not much call  for that on the ham bands!

Mike / KK5F