"Jim Stewart" wrote in message
.. .

RST Engineering wrote:
And you think that relay, with operation measured in hundreds of
milliseconds, is going to protect tens of watts from frying your
fractions of microvolts front end measured in tens of microseconds?

I have both an FCC commercial and ham license
and have a passing knowledge of RF. The
relay would be controlled by a manual switch
and would connect one radio to the antenna
and the other to a dummy load.

Most DowKey coaxial relays that we have "on our shelf" are of the
SO-239/PL-259 variety that were made by the bazillions in the '50s and '60s.
Two things are wrong with them. One, this non-constant impedance connector
variety isn't too much good above 30 MHz.. Two, unless you got the (rare)
gold-flashed version of the relay, the receive side of the relay with the
silver contacts will oxide and sulphide up in a few years and there is no
known way of getting inside to clean the contacts. You can remove the relay
from service and "flash" the contacts with a DC voltage/current source, but
this is a temporary fix at best.

Three, you now have trashed your dual radio redundancy with a single point
failure. When (not if) the relay goes TU, you have lost your communications
capability.

As somebody else pointed out, a second antenna is the optimum solution.
Whether or not you choose to take this good advice is up to you.


What a maroon.

Great way to treat a customer. I didn't
complain when you took 4 weeks to send me
an intercom kit. Now you insult me on the
internet. Time to call it quits.


The day I don't call it like I see it for fear of ****ing off a customer, a
constituent, or an FAA inspector is the day they take me out the door feet
first.

Jim