[TowerTalk] Remote switch

[Steve London]

 > The legacy switches like the B&W shorted the unused ports
 > to ground as a "lightning protection" feature.  There was
 > some switch advertised as "Protax" that had this.
 > I believe for a wafer switch like this, it basically costs nothing
 > to do it.  With relays, it does cost something.

This is a B&W 550A. Unused ports are not grounded.

 > Does this mean if you have one beam aimed at the Caribbean and one on Europe 
 > > and only the EU antenna is selected, you're still receiving stations on the 
 > Caribbean beam but 45dB weaker? Is this an issue?

Yes, this is what it means. If your European antenna has more than ~45dB of 
directivity, then it could be an issue.

For more fun and debate, I made measurements on one of my RCS-4. Port 4 was the 
reference port - connected to a 50 ohm load. The isolation between port 3 and 
port 4 was the worst, about 43 dB at 30 MHz and 49 dB at 14 MHz. Port 1 to port 
4 was about 5 dB better. Since I'm using one my RCS-4's to switch between 
beverages, I also checked at 1.8 MHz. 65 dB between ports 4 and 3. That's 
probably adequate unless one of the ports is connected to a much higher gain 
antenna, like the 160 transmit antenna.

73,
Steve, N2IC