After building my desk rack a few months back, it’s time to actually start using it. My plan was to have anything shared between operators to be place in the middle of the desk or in the rack. One of these things is antenna switching.

Starting with 2 Alpha Delta switches I already had, I went out and bought 2 3U blank rack panels. I drilled out the panels for screw mounting, control switch and GAS fuse. I have enough room now for 6 switches. I also created labels in Microsoft Visio for the panels.

The idea is to assign an antenna to each individual switch, which is where you would select the radio. On the next row, you would select your antenna on a specific radio switch.

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Also to note, I decided to rewire the inside portion of the shack and upgrade from RG-8x to RG-8u and also a quad Alpha-Delta switch. You can still see the existing 8x runs out to the outdoor grounding system, of which also feeds 8x up to the antennas. Only 200 feet of cable to replace… at $1.45/foot. Yikes.

The switch on the left selects either antenna (beam or vertical) or dummy load. The switch on the right selects the radio, either the Icom or the Heathkit.