Stu2 - W7IY

Switching Beverages

October 21, 2007

Summary

At the W4RM contest station, we manually selected receiving antennas (beverages) by moving a patch cord between connectors on a wall-mounted box. It was tough to keep up with the propagation changes, DX spots and random calls. So I designed and built an antenna switch, which gives us the capability of switching antennas from our operating positions. The control is mounted next to the operators keyboard and the antenna matrix is mounted in the back room.

Click through the pictures and diagrams below or visit the project discussion page for a write up of all the details.

I spent about 120 hours learning, building and testing. Maybe more. I really didn't keep track. Thanks to generous junk boxes, the project cost about $180. Most of that was for the PC Board expenditure ($65,) which I'm not sure I would do again.

Stu2


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