Since There Will Be Lots of Antenna Related Work ...

My standard hurricane preps up to a few years ago included cranking my tower over, removing the antennas and leaving them on the ground, then cranking the tower back up.  We haven't had a direct hit in a while, and when tropical storm Ian (a really bad hurricane over in SW Florida) came through in late September of '22 I made the mistake of not doing what I'd always done. From the looks of Milton, I'm going to go ahead and do that. Most likely that'll be Tuesday morning - and hopefully be done quickly.  

I know I've said before that my antenna projects all tend to start with the words, "when it cools down."  This year, I've been playing with the idea of automating something I do manually, selecting the antenna the radio will connect to automatically when I change the band I'm operating on. 

Right now I use two switches, and here's a diagram I posted in June of '23 to illustrate things. 

All of this is indoors on the radio desk. The top switch selects which of the three antennas I have (or a dummy load) connects to the next switch, which then selects which of four radios to connect to. Since I don't have an antenna for that VHF/UHF port on my backup radio (IC-7000), the last label on the right, I just leave a short coaxial cable jumper (RG-58) to use with either the QRP IC-703 or test equipment like the NanoVNA H4. 

In general, I only need to change the top (antenna) selector when I'm operating. Right now, I'm looking into ways to automate that and whether or not there are advantages to doing that - besides a little convenience.  There's one advantage that shows up immediately: it replaces three cables coming in through the wall with one - the output of a remote switch.  Since the pipe through the wall for the bunch of cables is already there, that really doesn't buy me much. Each of those three cables would be shortened, go to a lightning protector, and then to the switch outside (possible examples of lightning protector and switch). The lightning protectors could be mounted to a separate ground rod for each antenna; I've also seen a larger chassis that more than one protector could be mounted to and that chassis mounted to a separate ground rod. 

Remember, when it comes to getting rid of a lightning strike, the more ground the better.  As we used to say to newbies trying to layout a printed circuit board: "groundliness is next to Godliness." 

My main station radio is the IC-7610, and it has enough memories for frequency and mode that I can press a front panel button and immediately change frequency. The radio will remember how its antenna tuner is set, but it has no way of selecting the antenna that it "knows" how to tune.  It would be convenient to press that button and have it select the antenna for me at the same time. Failing that, the various pieces of software I'm running all the time might be able to generate a command to switch the antenna.

The research aspect of this has been the most time consuming, so far.  And, yes, since I have my small machine shop, I have thought about making a cute little robot that stands on top of the shelf where my switch is located and just rotates the antenna switch knob for me.

Marvin the Paranoid Android - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Image credit: Blenderartists (.org)