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April 2026 - Interface to use with VBand for CW Practice.
All the real work for this project was done by two other hams. Tony KD8RRT and OZ1JHM.
I had signed up for the CW Academy and as the start day approached I learned that we would be using “Vband” as part of the class.
The way that this website works is you can use the "[" and "]" keys on your keyboard to send morse and have a QSO with others via the website. Thus you can practice without the risk of embarrasement as your morse code improves.
However, that sending method is not ideal and you can use an interface that acts like an additional keyboard which generates those two special keys.
The chaps that run the Vband website have their own interface and they warn you that clones of this have been reported not to work.
Their interface costs $47 to mail internationally from the USA. That won’t account for import duty or VAT in the UK. The clones will probably cost no more than $10 to ship and small purchases from China somehow seem to slide in without import duty or VAT. But there is the risk that it doesn’t work and you also might have to wait many weeks for delivery.
That is where the work of KD8RRT and OZ1JHM comes in. Tony used an Arduino Pro Micro clone - so that is what I got from Amazon UK for £6.99 delivered.
I then used the Arduino IDE tool to load the sketch shown on Tony’s Github page.
Here is my homebrew project.
Here is a video showing morse code being generated by the VBand website. Although you can't see it, the decoded text is shown on that webpage.