[TowerTalk] Open Wire

[Richard Thorne]

I wouldn't buy a tuner period, unless I was forced to.  No tuner here accept for
the one in the rig to handle cw to ssb excursions on the low bands.  I'd rather
spend the $300 to $400 or more to reasonate the antenna before I spent the money
on a tuner.

On the other hand some don't have a choice.  And hopefully if theres a 30% loss
in a particular tuner, that tuner wouldn't be purchased.

DavidC wrote:

> > I think there was a  reveiw on tuners in qst a while back.  It included
> several
> > tuners in the review.
>
> OK.  But would you or anyone you know buy a tuner with 30% loss on the
> band(s) of operation ... unless you lived in one of the worst possible Ham
> locations and had to load a rain gutter or the like?
>
> With all of the money we spend to gain a few watts and a dB or two of
> antenna gain I cannot see giving away 30% to a poorly designed tuner
> into a poorly designed antenna!
>
> > 30% sounds like a lot, but it's only 1.55 dB.  Not to be ignored, by any
> > means, but not a brutal signal reduction.  0.5 dB is about 10% signal
> > loss.
>
> Many Hams pay big money to get 1.55 dB more gain out of one beam
> versus another, either jumping to different models or different
> manufacturers.
> Flushing that difference down the toilet of a poorly designed and
> implemented
> tuner-antenna system seems contradictory to known patterns of decisionmaking
> by Hams.  Surely we've seen lots of debate here about small dB differences
> between like beams ... not to mention log periodics versus yagis versus
> quads!
>
> I also wonder what 300 watts of dissipation looks like at full legal inside
> of a tuner ... heat and shack-RF must get real ugly!  Something is wrong
> with this picture ... help?
>
> And perhaps I need to take a hard look at my implementation here ... hate
> to think I am warming the shack rather than warming the ether!
>
> 73, DavidC  K1YP
>
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--
73,

Richard Thorne
ARS N5ZC (ex KA2DSY, N2BHP, WB5M)
Remote Control Airplanes:  AMA# 657062
http://www.tcac.net/~rthorne/



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