My Dad studied to become a naval radio officer when he was younger. It is important to learn morse code for this job and thus made the oscillator pictured below to practice. Using a lever to break the circuit, pauses between the sound can be made causing the silence between the dits and dahs(short staccato sound and longer legato sound) of each letter. My dad gave me the oscillator and electronic components from the 70s when I explained what I was trying to achieve for my installation and so I decided to experiment with these parts, potentially seeing if I could fix the oscillator.

To start with, their was a couple things about the oscillator I had to change. I’d never seen the output in this circuit and had no way of listening back to whether any sound was produced or not so I intended. to replace it with a standard jack socket I borrowed from one of my eurorack modules. It was a challenge to take out as it was soldered to 3 different points and had a very sturdy design, meaning I would have to melt the solder on all 3 connections simultaneously to take it out. Instead I elected to run the signal through this output to the jack socket, soldering the signal carrying part of the mystery output to the positive of the jack socket. Also soldering the grounds of each socket together as well. I also had to solder a connecting wire between the 2 wires which the telegraph key would’ve been attached to, completing the circuit. Unfortunately after attempting all these alterations it still wasn’t able to work. I think this might be down to some of the components being very old and very dusty, being kept in a damp garage may have ruined 1 or more of the components in the circuit. This, however, was a useful way to practice what I’ve been learning about oscillators, circuit design and fault finding/problem solving in general something that as a budding analog circuit maker enthusiast I’m sure I will have to do more of in the future.