[Elecraft] Balanced Tuners

[Monty Shultes]

My approach to wire antennas has been pragmatic since, as a 13-year-old novice, I tried to load up an 80 meter dipole fed with TV twin lead connected to an unbalanced tank circuit.

I now have an 80-meter doublet fed with open wire line.  A 4:1 balun sits outside the shack wall - I had it inside the shack but experienced troubles with RF-modulated audio in my Kenwood MC-60 mic.

Before K3 I used a 756ProII.  Its tuner could not match the antenna very well.  I therefore had to use an MFJ tuner with balun.  Its settings were not predictable - a short frequency excursion often required retuning.   I knew the K3 tuner would work because of experience with K2s.

I get low SWR at the input to the KAT3 on all bands through 6 meters.  I do not know how well the setup works above 15 meters due to lack of activity.  It's great on 20 and 17 meters.  A little touchy on 40 (second harmonic) but good performance.  Lovely on 75 phone - except it picks up too much static(!)  My tribander sits unassembled in the garage.  I am working on rotating the property for directional control(!!)

My point - an amateur can get good results with wire antennas.  Maybe not the best, but good.  They are cheap and fairly sturdy.  Use stranded wire.  If open-wire fed they can work on many bands when impedance is transformed from balanced to unbalanced and a good tuner is used.