A friend of mine made mention during our last conversation that he needed a new foot switch for his HF rig. For those of you who have no idea what I just said it’s a foot pedal used to put a radio into transmit mode so you can basically work hands free. He had made mention that the foot pedal he had he had picked up at a local music shop which in turn prompted me to tell him he should’ve know better because they were crap, as you’ll soon see. The sound of having a foot switch sounded nice to me, but all I had was the crappy music store foot pedal I used for my keyboard and using it only for that I’ve already been inside it twice to re-solder the crappy wire connection, so some re-engineering was in order to make it radio worthy.
This is the original guts and glory of the foot pedal. Notice the long wire that basically shorts out on the cross stub when you step on the pedal. That wire has been cleaned at least 12 times because it has horrible corrosion resistance. Also notice the HUGE glob of solder in the top right corner holding that wire on. that was from the last repair when the wire just fell off of the board completely. See, complete and total crap.
First thing first, rip the guts out….. now to find something to replace it with.
This is a handy little switch I had sitting in a junk box in the shop. Every radio guy has a junk box, they may differ in size and quantity, but they all have one somewhere. This is a nice heavy duty mechanical switch, it will outlast the equipment it’s hooked to I’m sure.
I did some dry fits to see where it would work the best, then marked the holes and mounted the switch.
Now the foot pedal is reliable again and should bring years of service!
Other than the two small bolt heads that are barely visible on the other side and the mechanical clicking of the REAL switch inside the pedal now, it looks exactly as it did when I started. Now if 6 Meters would just open up, I could use it!