• You can now help support WorldwideDX when you shop on Amazon at no additional cost to you! Simply follow this Shop on Amazon link first and a portion of any purchase is sent to WorldwideDX to help with site costs.
  • The Feb 2025 Radioddity Giveaway Results are In! Click Here to see who won!

Reply to thread

Here is a start.Here is theremote antenna switch I built. It uses 24 volt relays simply because I had a bucket full of them at the time. I used Potter and Brumfield KHAU-17D11 type with gold contacts. They were housed in a sealed aluminum enclosure and wired so that all unused relays were grounded and when the power was turned off everything went to ground. The first picture is of the front panel and as you can see it was built with an antenna for every band in mind. Since I had/have a tribander I used isolation diodes to allow the same relay to be selected when the switch was in the 10,15, or 20m position. I also set it up so that an external coaxial switch would engage below 30m and route to a separate feedline. The switch would select one of two VHF antennas by controlling a small coaxial switch due to the problems of using frame relays at 2m and up. All the HF stuff used the P&B frame relays.The use of both red and green LED's was to remind me which bands needed a tuner. On 20m and up no tuner was needed, I don't bother with 30m, and 40m and down required a tuner so hence the use of red LED's. When this was built I used the 40,80, 160,and extra A, B, C positions  to select taps on a coil that was at the base of a vertical wire antenna. The taps were selected by yet more P&B relays and were housed in a box at the base of the tower. The cream of the crop so to speak came from incorporating a remote tune feature as can be seen by the small toggle switch. It is a spring loaded switch with center OFF and switches 120 volts to a split phase AC motor driven tuning capacitor also in the box at the tower base. This made tuning the antenna child's play, just select the band, key the TX, push the switch either up for clockwise rotation or down for counterclockwise rotation and watch the SWR meter. The motor drive has a 3600:1 ratio and only requires a 180 degree rotation so it usually only took 15 seconds at the most to tune the antenna and often just a few seconds depending on the position of the capacitor.I don't use it right now but I will when I rebuild the antenna system next year.




Oh yeah, I'm not taking the cover off to show you but the guts of the TenTec tuner seen in the pix was rebuilt too after the cheap toroid coil literally caught fire and destroyed the switch. I wound a new larger toroid and replaced the switch with a heavier ceramic type. No more fires on 160m and the matching is easier.






Here is the rear view and all the wires.