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

[Georgens, Tom]

Pete -

I have yet to get my QST so I will reserve judgment on the article.

However, I have a control box that automatically switches antennas, filters, Beverages, headphones, keyer, and mic for my SO2R contest station.  It is now on its third PC board revision and I have even more ideas not yet implemented.  If I ever get around do doing another one, it will absolutely use a microcontroller.  Had I just used the microcontroller the first time, I suspect I never would have had to redo the PC boards.  The box is quite clever as it now stands but it is just too hard to add new features with a discrete logic implementation. 

Admittedly my station is somewhat uncommon, but I do see where a microcontroller could be useful.

73, Tom W2SC

-----Original Message-----
From: Pete Smith [mailto:n4zr at contesting.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2005 5:01 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 
www.pvrc.org/WCSD/WCSDsearch.htm  

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