[CQ-Contest] antenna switch control box?

[Paul Young]

Dave,

Is there a reason you are looking at individual boxes?

My home station is built around a homebrew box which controls 64 relays
from an RS-232 connection.  It has basic hot-switch protection in that
it is connected to the amp keying lines and won't switch when the radio
is transmitting.

As designed it can handle 63 antennas but it could handle more if you
don't need to have it resolve SO2R conflicts.  It also has some other
nice capabilities, like the ability to automatically switch to different
antennas for transmit and receive.  This is useful if the top antenna
can't hear because of rain static.

I'm running mine from a stand-alone controller but it can be connected
to a PC, which is how I debugged it.

We're planning to do something similar at W1KM.  My home unit can be
thought of as "proof of concept" but it can has six key line inputs
and with a few level inverters could probably drive the whole station.

As far as construction, the box is pretty small.  The only difficult
part was making holes for the DB-25 connectors I used for the relay
outputs.

                            Paul, K1XM

David Robbins K1TTT wrote:
> I am looking at the new mfj rcs-12c remote switch controller.  It is an 8
> pushbutton box that controls up to 8 relays or bcd output, has built in band
> decoding with programmable buttons, last antenna on band memory, hot switch
> protection, amp key line lockout while switching, and probably a few other
> things.... at $229 it is too expensive and has features I don't want/need.
> Is there, or would any one want to build, something at about half that price
> that just did the 8 pushbuttons with hot switch protection... no band
> decoding, no memory, no bcd ouput.  I would want at least 6 or 7 of them.
> 
> 
> David Robbins K1TTT
> e-mail: mailto:k1ttt at arrl.net
> web: http://www.k1ttt.net
> AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://dxc.k1ttt.net
>  
> 
> 
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