At some point, you may want to arrange SDR receivers for easy antenna switching. Here’s how I accomplished this with my SDR radios and active antenna controllers.

You may recall the days when your radio shack organization centered on big box radio gear. Today, we find ourselves centered on a couple of computer monitors and the mouse. Often, we don’t even need to see the radios themselves.

Over the past year, my SWL activities have focused on “tiny box” receivers and wideband active loop antennas. These were getting spread out over my operating desk. I thought it time to arrange SDR receivers in a more permanent fashion. In particular, I wanted to be able to easily switch my active loops to the different radios, using BNC patch cables.

Take a look at the picture, above. On the right are my active loop control boxes. Lower right is my control box for two AAA-1C wideband loops. Just behind it is my homebrew LZ1AQ dual loop controller and power supply, which includes a high pass filter.

On the left are my receivers: Perseus, Afedri dual channel and SDRPlay RSP2. You can also see a single coax run to connect the active loops to Antenna 2 on my Flex 6300, located elsewhere.

Everything is out of the way but within arm’s length for antenna switching. The board is actually underneath my main antenna switching, and just to the right of my dual PC monitors.

Arrange SDR Receivers Out of Sight

My effort to arrange SDR receivers just uses a 12″ by 24″ piece of quarter inch plywood and some plastic parts. You will find it pretty easy to 3D print mounting brackets for the small radios, and screw these into the plywood. Similarly, my homebrew plastic active antenna control boxes also screw down nicely.

The board has to be somewhere close to your computer within easy reach for USB cables and, in the case of the Afedri, an Ethernet connection. I left space in the middle of the board for inserting my outboard high pass filter when needed to reduce local medium wave signals.