I found myself in immediate need of a 3.5mm TRS cable and I thought it would be a fun little project to build my own. I already had a couple spools of antenna wire lying around that would do just fine for the project. I also had tons of spade plugs of all sizes. I cut myself three lengths of wire, about two feet or so each. After stripping the wire ends, I soldered each onto a separate lug of a TRS plug and assembled the protective outer coverings and strain relief. I didn’t have anything to cover the length of the finished cable so I opted to simply twist the three wires around one another sufficiently enough that they’d stay mostly in a helical shape. I then slid a few bits of shrink tubing to a few places along the cable and put a flame under them to synch them down. On the other end of the cable, I got the multimeter out and checked which wire went to tip, ring, or sleeve. I wanted to make it easy to know which wire was what, so I slid short lengths of shrink tubing over each wire so that the tip wire would have red, ring would have yellow, and sleeve would have black. I then crimped and soldered spade lugs onto the ends of each wire and slid the shrink tube up over the soldered lug and put some heat to it.
I now have a custom TRS cable that can be used with any of my Morse code paddles.
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73s,
Matthew, K2MAS
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