[UK-CONTEST] Building and testing VHF antenna combiners

[Nick Gregory]

Hi All,

I am planning to make a four way power combiner for 144MHz, with the
materials I
have to hand the Zo will work out to be 52 ohms, in reality is this close
enough
to 50ohms to make no difference, I do not want to waste any hard earned
gain.
Would it be possible to increase or decrease the length of the 1/4 wave
lines in
the combiner to make it look like 50ohms?

I have built a two way combiner for 70MHz, I wanted to check this out so I
put a
SWR meter on the input and placed loads on the two outputs, this gave me a
very
low SWR, surprisingly I disconnected one of the loads and SWR did not rise
as
much as I would have thought, something like 1.5 or 2 to one, I expected
3:1.
Is there a better way to test out a combiner.

Many thanks

Nick G0HIK