{"id":2314,"date":"2013-11-21T10:52:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T23:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2013\/11\/21\/bitx-build-update-20-switchable-crystals-south-africa-qso\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T13:04:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T03:04:07","slug":"bitx-build-update-20-switchable-crystals-south-africa-qso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2013\/11\/21\/bitx-build-update-20-switchable-crystals-south-africa-qso\/","title":{"rendered":"BITX Build Update #20 &#8212; Switchable Crystals, South Africa QSO"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/P1010216.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"239\" src=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/P1010216.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p> <strong>I got tired of popping the hood and manually changing my VXO crystals. First I tried to switch the rocks using a rotary switch on the front panel, but I think the leads were too long and the output was kind of squirrely. So I dug around in the junk box and found a 12 volt double pole double throw relay. I put the crystal sockets across the two poles and ran leads from the armature terminals to the crystal terminals. I use the rotary switch to activate the relay. I cover about 41 kHz of the 17 meter band with the two crystals. <\/strong><br \/> <strong><\/strong><br \/> <strong>17 meters has been in great shape. On November 16 I had a very nice contact with Syd, ZS1TMJ in Glenwilliam, South Africa. That&#8217;s about 8000 miles on 5 watts SSB. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p> Our book: &#8220;SolderSmoke &#8212; Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/soldersmoke.com\/book.htm\">http:\/\/soldersmoke.com\/book.htm<\/a> Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cafepress.com\/SolderSmoke\">http:\/\/www.cafepress.com\/SolderSmoke<\/a> Our Book Store: <a href=\"http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/contracross-20\">http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/contracross-20<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got tired of popping the hood and manually changing my VXO crystals. First I tried to switch the rocks using a rotary switch on the front panel, but I think the leads were too long and the output was kind of squirrely. So I dug around in the junk box and found a 12 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2013\/11\/21\/bitx-build-update-20-switchable-crystals-south-africa-qso\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;BITX Build Update #20 &#8212; Switchable Crystals, South Africa QSO&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,28,276],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-17-meters","category-bitx20","category-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2314"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2316,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314\/revisions\/2316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}