[TowerTalk] Sources of Coax Relays

Larry Loen lwloen at gmail.com
Thu Jul 12 10:54:08 PDT 2012


It appears this work has been done and maybe done to death.

But for those of us who (like me) are new, can you expand a little,
and, particularly,  give a couple of links?  What I see below is
someone who knows the answer, but is speaking to others that know the
answer, not to someone just getting started in this.

I'm eventually going to want to make my station work remotely, so I'll
be interested in high quality, high power coax switches that work well
through at least HF and sometimes 6 meters.  I had a handful of really
good switches on a 1K amp I ran a while back, but those came from a
trusted friend and I don't live in that state now anyway; sold the amp
long ago.


Larry Wo0Z


On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Pete Smith N4ZR <n4zr at contesting.com> wrote:
> I've used dozens of $2 PC board power relays over the years in various
> antenna switching applications, and have never had a failure at >1300
> watts and SWRs from 1:1 up to over 3:1.  W2VJN reported similar, much
> more rigorously tested results at TopTen Devices.  I don't see any
> reason to gild this lily further.
>
> 73, Pete N4ZR
> The World Contest Station Database, at www.conteststations.com
> The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
> spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000 and
> arcluster.reversebeacon.net, port 7000
>
> On 7/12/2012 9:20 AM, Jim Lux wrote:
>> On 7/11/12 8:58 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
>>> I'm looking for good quality coax relays for use at the 1,5kW level.
>>> Some will be used only on 160M, most will be used on the HF bands. I may
>>> have a use for a few at the 200W level on 2M.  Some will be used for 6-
>>> or 8-position switching to radios, while others will be used with very
>>> different logic.  I'm hoping that I can do everything with 12VDC or
>>> 24VDC. Nearly all will be used indoors, but I need at least one or two
>>> that are easy to weatherproof.
>>>
>>> I've got a couple of the Array Solutions products, but I'm not thrilled
>>> with the relays that are used.
>>>
>> What about those doesn't thrill you?
>>
>>
>> I assume you're looking for something reasonably inexpensive, that is,
>> you're looking to repurpose a conventional DC-60Hz kind of power relay
>> to RF.
>>
>> There's been quite a lot of discussion on this list (and others) over
>> the years about which relays seem to work better or worse.  Complicating
>> this is that a model number that worked 10 years ago might not work
>> today: it will have the same pinout, contact configuration, and 60 Hz
>> performance, but the RF properties could be quite different.
>>
>> It sounds like you're going to need a lot of relays in the long run
>> (dozens), so maybe the thing to do is to build some little PC boards
>> that hold one relay and do some testing?
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>>
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