"Mark" wrote:
Can I simply build myself a switch box? Put each antenna onto a common bus
and use switches to assign to the various outputs that are connected to the
various receivers?
Can it be that simple? And what of using two antennas at once? Anybody
experimented with this? Any gain (no pun intended) in doing that?
Well, you could buy a coax switch to switch between your antennas and
then use multicouplers to distribute the RF around.
I made a simple phasing box that couples two antennas and allows me to
select one, the other, both in phase and 180 degrees out of phase. It
works, but...
You only get 3dB gain on a good day, and that is certainly lost among
the couplers and isolation transformers needed. Occasionally I get
spectacular results in eliminating phasing, but overall the project
was a failure.
The advantage of feeding from multiple antennas is reducing fading and
steering the reception pattern. To do that properly a better system
than my passive arrangement needs to be done. See Ron Hardin's post
about using ANC-4s as phaser-combiners.
Eric
--
Eric F. Richards,
"Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn't
the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it's the offense
that I take most personally."
-- http://www.reason.com/links/links071304.shtml