[Elecraft] A/B antenna switch for ladder line fed antennas

[Kevin Rock]

Thank you for the fine suggestions and nice photos.

John, W2AGN, you and my father would have enjoyed each other's hand built 
cases.  He crafted one for each of his hobbies.  He was trained as a 
cabinet maker by my great grandfather.

It looks like I will take bits from each idea and use a relay to do some 
of the work.  As usual I'll kluge a few ideas together until I get what I 
want.  Since I use a chart to tune each antenna I don't worry about 
matching rapidly.  While I am running my nets I have been known to jump 
 from my ladder line fed G5RV to a coaxially fed G5RV and back again while 
calling by retuning on the fly from my charts for the various antennas.  
My auto tuner is a bit old fashioned: I use my eyes, my head, and my hand 
;)  Keeps me thinking while I am copying code and trying to dig out a 
faint one.

I am unsure where I can find a knife switch but I do like the idea of the 
barrier strips.  I use them to keep our phone lines working and up out of 
the reach of the ravenous gnawing critters who've broken our Internet 
connection more than once.  Those mountain lions come in handy for 
clearing a swath out of the critter gene pool ;)

I wish I still had my stock of telephone stepping relays.  I had a few 
dozen new in box I could have used to craft some nifty antenna switches.  
However a few relays in a binary tree could be used to open quite a number 
of possibilities.  The trees are only getting taller so I could have any 
number of open line and ladder line fed test antennas.  A good switching 
system is all that stands in my way.

Onward to destiny!  Or: "Ad astra per aspera!"
    Kevin.  KD5ONS




On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 17:02:53 -0700, Kevin Rock <kevinrock at earthlink.net> 
wrote:

> I have a fancy switch for A/B antenna testing for coaxially fed antennas 
> but do not know what folks use for antenna switches with antennas fed by 
> ladder lines.  I want to compare a 160 meter full wave loop fed with 
> homebrew ladder line to a G5RV fed by 450 window line.  Any 
> suggestions?  I knife switch of some sort like we used in grade school 
> science labs in the '60s?  Or is there something more modern?
>     Kevin.  KD5ONS




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