Having sold and shipped away my MFJ and Ten Tec tuners,
I've found my 87A linear wants some antenna tweaking to be
happy on 80 CW and 160. So, picked up the phone and
ordered a Viking MB-V-A 3kW tuner. HRO happily took my
order, said something about a backlog, and clocked the
price already to my Visa card, statement has now come with
the charge thereon. Have waited a couple of weeks, so called
HRO once again. No word on the unit, so asked for the phone
number of the Wm. M. Nye Co., now in Idaho.
Called there, and Don told me I would be waiting some six to
nine more months for delivery of the tuner! I was both disappointed
and shocked, to say the least. Don went on to explain that just
about everything in the unit is made right there: coils, caps, case,
the works. In fact that day he was cutting out capacitor plates!
A lobor of love, he explained.
He then mentioned that I might find the unit might not tune on 160!
Another surprise. He couldn't tell me why it might not work, but
that for some set ups it worked, and others it didn't. Sometimes he
could make some little fixes to bring the unit around on 160, and
other times he couldn't.
So, I guess now I must wait many months to discover if the unit
will do half of what I ordered it to do. Have any of you in your
contest stations used the unit and had to do some inside-the-
box fixes to get it to tune about the 160 and lower 80 bands?
I'm setting up my 160 full size half-wave dipole to resonate
as close to 1830 as I can, since KH6 is DX per the ARRL;
the 80 resonates about 3750, but has around 4:1
vswr at 3505; needless to say the 87A won't put out a peep
at that reflection!
Any thoughts would be appreciated. Really think I'd like to get
the pi-network of the Viking design, a la the old Johnson Viking
Matchbox design fame, so guess will just have to wait and hope.
I would think if I got a pretty low 50 vswr at 1830 or so, the unit
would tune around the area enough to get below 1.5 (the Alpha's
seeming cut-off to fault vswr).
BTW, ARRL DX begins in about 63 minutes!
73 and Aloha,
Jim Reid, AH6NB (Happily retired on the Island of Kauai)
Hawaii, USA Email: jreid@aloha.net
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