[TowerTalk] MFJ analyzer woes

[Rob Atkinson, K5UJ]

Regarding the problem with the MFJ swr analyzer, I noticed something 
interesting with mine a few weeks ago (I own the 259 or is it 269?  the one 
with UHF coverage) when I was using it to tune my transmatch on my open wire 
feed to my horiz. loop.  At night I was unable to tune the transmatch below 
a 1.4:1 swr and the analyzer showed around 10 to 20 ohms reactance. I 
normally can tune the matching network so the rig sees a nice 50 ohm load 
with no reactance, i.e. 1:1.  I went ahead and operated figuring there was 
just something goofy outside like a lot of water on the line and in the 
daytime the problem was gone.  Over time, I noticed this problem correlated 
with a relatively new (now gone) presence of 20 db over 9 line noise all 
over the HF spectrum which I had been temporarily getting rid of with a 
noise blanker pending time to find it.
If you have a big antenna and some powerful nearby source of HF RF junk, 
this might be throwing your analyzer off and making it give you a false 
reading, i.e. the problem doesn't have to be a mw bc station.

rob/k5uj

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