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

[Jim Lux]

At 05:00 AM 9/17/2005, Pete Smith wrote:
>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?


More likely, someone had a PIC development kit and wanted to develop 
something. Many a senior engineering project has been born of such 
circumstances.  Or, they needed a controller, had a PIC eval kit, 
etc.  There have been a lot of things I've built over the years that were 
needlessly complex, because I happened to have one of the pieces sitting 
around (the danger of going to hamfests or surplus stores...).

Clearly, QST isn't oriented towards publishing construction articles of 
good quality commercial style design.  I'll bet that if you ARE a decent 
commercial designer, you're busy building your product, not writing 
articles to submit to QST.

Frankly, I don't envy the QST editors. I'll bet they don't get a huge 
number of even vaguely suitable articles submitted in a form close to 
publishable. Look at all the partially completed web pages out there on 
various projects (including my own).  It's a huge amount of work to get it 
all done.  Short of ARRL funding some professional writers (not on ARRL's 
budget!) to work with folks who have done the project, it's not likely to 
change. And keeping a monthly magazine going is a chore.. it's a beast that 
must be fed. As soon as issue N is put to bed, issue N+1 is staring you in 
the face.