Quote:
Originally Posted by newsphotog
Wow, that really sucks. I bricked two scanners. After talking to an old ham, he told me that when APRS first started out it wasn't uncommon for these things to happen. Which is weird, since I had asked him before if this was a bad idea and he said no...
Would 50 watts be too much? I thought a lot of people sometimes run 50w in the boonies for APRS.
Yeah, obviously, I turned it down today but the damage has already been done.
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I don't know that anyone can tell you the exact power level that would be safe, but I wouldn't put 50 watts through an antenna 10 inches from my scanner antenna. If it were me, I'd move one of those antennas as far from the other as I could.
I'm not absolutely sure, but I somewhat recall that even if the scanner (or other receiver) is turned off it can suffer damage from excessive input signals.
I suppose that some kind of antenna switching relay could be used to disconnect the receive antenna prior to transmitting on the other antenna, but that seems like a considerable project for a transmitter that transmits automatically every few minutes. If it were strictly a voice transmitter, you could manually switch the receive antenna off prior to transmitting, but then there's always the possibility of forgetting. I'd move one of the antennas.
73
Dick