[TowerTalk] Antenna Switching - Complexity for its own sake?

[Brian Smithson]

I thought so too. I have an antenna controller that I built based on a microcontroller but it understands multiple antennas for the
same band, remembers the last antenna I was on when I return to a band, and sends commands to an ACOM amp to 'tune' it for that band
without having to key up. I was lucky enough to have it published in NCJ a few years back.

I'm working on a new version of basically the same thing that can take band data input from four radios with the selected radio
indicated by a signal from a 'NCS Multiswitcher' that I have. The idea is to have antenna selection come with all the same logic
before but band data multiplexed based on audio/key/mic selections made on the multiswitcher. 

For me it's a fun learning experience because I'm a software guy by training so the home-brew hardware stuff is the challenge. It's
also fun to write software for something with only a thousand bytes of RAM.

The article is still good for me though - I get some ideas on line conditioning.

73!

-Brian n8wrl

> -----Original Message-----
> From: towertalk-bounces at contesting.com 
> [mailto:towertalk-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Pete Smith
> Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2005 8:01 AM
> To: towertalk at contesting.com
> Subject: [TowerTalk] Antenna Switching - Complexity for its own sake?
> 
> The latest QST includes a lead tech article on an automatic 
> antenna switch controller that uses a PIC and a lot of other 
> parts on an expensive PC board to switch 5 antennas either 
> manually or in response to band data from various 
> transceivers.  I must be missing something, because this 
> seems like a LOT of trouble for less capability than could be 
> gotten from a $20 W9XT band decoder card and a few added 
> components.  I know that there are some radios that don't 
> provide BCD band data, but that problem is usually dealt with 
> by running a computer program that provides the band data on 
> an LPT port.
> 
> For this they burn 8 pages? 
> 
> 73, Pete N4ZR
> The World HF Contest Station Database
> was updated on 18 August 2005
> 2988 contest stations at
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> 
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