[TowerTalk] DX Engineering Antenna Switch - Grounding

[ac9s at mchsi.com]

I posed a question here a week or so ago about grounding unused ports on the DX Engineering switch - the consensus was to ground them.  Today, prior to soldering in the grounding jumpers, I called DX Engineering to verify that doing so would still allow me to select those ports.  IT DOES NOT.  According to tech support soldering the jumpers will permanently ground that position.  It cannot be selected unless the jumper is removed.  My switch is the RR8A-HP, the 5KW version.  I just checked the 10KW version and found its manual states "Lightning protection is excellent in the RR8-SD relay system. There
is never an ungrounded path for lightning, regardless of how you
configure internal jumpers. To ground inactive ports, solder a jumper
wire between the foil traces for that port as shown.

So the low and high power versions are configured differently.  The lower power version will NOT allow you to have unselected ports grounded, merely "inactive" ones.  I wish the catalog included that info.  I bought this one at Dayton and it is way past the point at which I can return it.

Keith
AC9S