Friday night, May 26, 2023
I was in the shack tonight enjoying my newly installed antenna and tuning across 75-meter phone when I ran across an interesting QSO.
One ham was telling the other about his trip to the Dayton Hamvention, and the discussion turned to antenna tuners.
The other ham said he had a great idea that he needed to pass onto Martin Jue, the founder of MFJ Enterprises.
This fellow told his friend he had a new feature that would revolutionize the antenna tuner business. the idea? To build in a switch in an antenna tuner to allow you to hook up TWO radios to the same tuner and switch between them.
The guy he was talking to marveled at the idea and how novel it was.
Novel idea?? Hardly! Apparently, the guy has never heard of using an antenna switch to switch radios rather than antennas. It really is all in where you place the switch — for more than 20 years in my shack, I have used two or more antenna switches solely to switch what radios (and what radio desk) get routed to the input of my antenna tuner.
In Shack A, I have three tables with radios on them. I have a six-position switch on the main operating position, and two of the six switch positions connect to either the left or right radio table. A switch on each table switches between the HF radios placed on those tables.
Simply put, it ain’t rocket science.
Over the years, I’ve picked up used antenna tuners at hamfests or on eBay, and you can get them well worth the money. It isn’t like they break or wear out.
I strongly suspect that Martin Jue will understand that if there had been a demand for input switching, he would have been the first to do it. But I strongly suspect he knows that its just simpler to use an existing antenna switch to change inputs to an antenna tuner, rather than re-inventing the wheel.
TRAFFIC NET. I check in again tonight on my Georgia CW net. My wife and I have date night planned for tomorrow, and I’ll probably miss the net. At least I’ve discovered I can still copy CW, lol.
73 es GN …. SK …. SK…. de KY4Z ….. (dit dit) ….