We have designed and developed an automatic switching mechanism that deactivates and activates a reception coil during the MR experiment according to the phase it is at. The mechanism uses a feedback loop in which a comparator defines whether the current reception signal derives from the RF excitation pulses or the MR signal and then triggers an analog switch at the back-end of the coil accordingly. We applied the mechanism on a custom-made four channel phased array probe and tested its functionality by transmitting RF pulses to the probe of similar length and power to those used in actual MRI systems. The results presented in this paper demonstrate the robustness of the design and its switching accuracy.

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