Over the last couple of days many of the parts for my lightning protection project have arrived. All I’m waiting for at this point is the NEMA enclosure which I orderd from Electrical Replacement Parts (an ebay seller). It seemed like it had shipped, but then the tracking number was coming up as invalid on the UPS site. An e-mail to the seller revealed that they had started the process, but the package was not ready when their daily pickup occured. I was told it would ship yesterday, but I have yet to see a new tracking number. Hopefully it gets on the road soon.
Tonight I started prepping my SO2R antenna switching to move from the basement to the new enclosure just outisde the house where the coax comes in. The switching uses two Ameritron RCS8V switches and a modified control box in the shack. Each antenna will come into the entrance enclosure through a bulkhead connector, and then be divided with one lead going to each switch. Here’s a picture with only one of the “dividers” attached for clarity.
These switches are quite old. The one on the left has some damage from when I first installed it on a crank-up tower about 15 years ago (and I got it used from another ham then). When I first cranked up the
tower one of the coax cables got caught on the base of the tower and ripped the connector off the switch. I have the ability to connect an antenna to this broken port, but have not since only 1 of my 2 amplifiers is capable of 160M operation, I just use port 5 for that band. The switch on the right was acquired from KV1W along with the control unit. He had built this switch up very early on in the SO2R days and upgraded to a SixPac or similar later, then sold one RCS8V and the control head to me. To the left is a picture of the control head. It’s a modified 
RCS8V control box. The rotary switch has been replaced by a power on lamp. The selected antenna leds have been replaced with dpst switches. Throwing a switch to the left connects the antenna with the left radio – throwing a switch to the right connects the antenna to the right radio. The only way both transcievers could be attached to the same antenna would be through a circuit failure of some sort. The switch works very well for my purposes, and could be automated if I so desired using band decoders and source driver boards.
I’ll be using PolyPhaser IS-B50LU-C0 surge suppressors to keep the lightning outside the house. These will be inserted in the line after the switches, just before the coax enters the house. Eventually I’d like to add 3 more of these supressors and put them in the line before the antennas get to the switches, but due to funding for this project, there are only 2 suppressors, and they’ll go between the switches and the radios.
Again due to cost, I ordered all my coax jumpers from R&L Electronics. They have a “house brand” called Jetstream, and have many legnths of pre-made coax jumpers. Since all my connections will occur inside a 16×16x8 enclosure, I choose 2 foot jumpers so there would be no tight connections. These jumpers were 6.95 each with nickel Amphenol pl-259’s. For a couple of bucks more I could have had silver plated connectors, but since I wasn’t soldering them, and they were all going to be inside an enclosure, I choose to go with the nickel plated ones. Here are some pictures of the cables. All the solder joints look good, and I’m very happy with the quality I see – time will tell how well they hold up. As you can see, these jumpers are RG-8X. I use mostly 8X throughout my station. I run 1000 watts max, and my coax runs are short due to my small lot. I’ve found the price for 8X to be good (especially through R&L) and the quality has been good as well. I’m willing to deal with the loss associated with this type of coax in my situation.
I hope to sepnd a good portion of Monday working on putting up my newly modified MA5B 15M beam, and then some time in succeeding days finishing this lightning project – once the NEMA enclosure arrives.
Keep watching for more updates.
73 de Al, KE1FO
