Just last week I decided to join the Straight Key Century Club (SKCC) because Jim N4JAW posted about it on his blog and it jives really well with my 2025 Goal to do more conversational CW. I got my number and plugged in my straight key. Cool? Cool!
The very next day, I decided to hunt some POTA activators. When I went to throw out my call, I was using the straight key – which is fine! – and my agility was lacking. In a POTA activation I want to be sure that I’m moving as quickly as the activator. This is doubly so in January when it might be really cold where that operator is sitting. Sure would be nice to bounce back and forth between my Vibrokeyer and my straight key. It’s easy enough to grab a Y-cable and plug them both into the back of the IC-7300, but digging through the menus to change between them is a hassle. Seriously. It’s buried 8 or so button clicks deep on the touchscreen.
The Need For Speed
This brings us back to my new hobby: controlling all of my radios via rigctl! I did some digging and sure enough, there was a nice blog post written up by Matt W1CDN that showed how to feed all of the necessary CI-V commands into flrig and set the Key Type to Paddle or Straight. Neat! Exactly what I was looking for.
I took the strings of commands and put them into two nice shell scripts (sk.sh and paddle.sh) and dumped them into /usr/local/bin and just about went on my way.
But…
Can’t This Be Easier?
What if I wanted to do it from an open rigctl session? There had to be something simpler like the setting for KEYSPD. I pulled up the GitHub repository for Hamlib and in version 4.6 there was a seemingly new parameter called KEYERTYPE in the source code for the IC-7300. I tried to poke and prod my install of rigctl to do something with it to no avail. It seems that I had two versions of hamlib installed. One was from Homebrew and the other was from Macports. I needed to do a little constructive updating of my system to get myself pointed at the latest version and it worked!
rigctl -m 2 P KEYERTYPE PADDLEThat will very quickly set the IC-7300 Key Type to, well, Paddle. And if you swap STRAIGHT for PADDLE you get a straight key setting. Heck, if you put in BUG you can even set it up for a bug. I’d never do that (never say never in this hobby…I fully expect a bug to show up in my shack within the week now that I’ve said that out loud) but you can!
Final
It seems that Hamlib is still evolving and is making life easier for those who want to plumb its depths. I highly recommend looking at all of those things that you do with your radio that cause friction and see if you can’t remove some of it with this powerful utility.
