Roy Smith wrote in message ...
My club wants to equip all our planes with jacks so people can plug
their handhelds into an external antenna in case the panel radios fail.

In the past, what we've done is had a length of coax run into the
cockpit with a BNC connector crimped onto it. The problem there is it
tends to get kicked around, the connector gets smashed, etc. When you
need it, it's not usable.

One alternative I've thought of is to have the antenna cable run to a
BNC jack on the panel. The problem with that idea is then you need a
length of cable to go from the jack to your radio, which will in turn
get lost, smashed up, etc.

Couldn't the jack-to-radio cable be coiled up and kept in the
glove compartment? Or, make each person w/ a handheld responsible
for rolling (and toting) their own radio-to-bnc cable -- we have
an extra length ourselves

wrt the bnc connector in the panel, one Grumman I saw had a
lower-tech solution. The cable between the radio and the
antenna looped through two holes in the panel. at the 2nd
hole, it was cut and a BNC connector put into place. So
there was no switch involved. It was very neatly done and
looked reasonable. I'll try to find a picture.

Cheers,
Sydney