[Antennas] re:MFJ986

[Robert Lay]

Dear Alal,

Please do not blame this situation on the tuner.

Everyone has difficulty in tuning an antenna to 17 meters, because everyone is
trying to tune antennas that are NOT designed for 17 meters and which are
inherently awkward to tune.

The problem is that the antenna presents an extremely low or an extremely high
impedance to the tuner and no amount of fiddling with the tuner or building new
tuners is going to help. The only thing that WILL help is to insert a matching
section designed specifically to bring the impedance seen by the tuner into
range of its abilities. That entails either measurements of the antenna system
impedance or some very careful intuitive analysis of what is going on. Follow
that with an appropriate design of a matching section and all will be fine.


Bob Lay (W9DMK), Dahlgren, VA
w9dmk at crosslink.net
http://www.qsl.net/w9dmk