It's hard to believe the bad coax switch was really hurting your rates
that much. A 1 dB loss couldn't possibly affect your rates that much,
but would have resulted in an average dissipation of 100 W or so
in the switch, which would have toasted it immediately. For example,
a low pass filter that got very warm during normal cw operation had
less than 0.1 dB of measured loss. It just doesn't
take much power to get something the size of a coax switch very
warm. Warm switches should be fixed right away, but unless your
switch is so big it takes 500 W to warm it up you shouldn't expect
much improvement in your signal at the other end. Must have been
propagation.
Scott K9MA
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