[Elecraft] KAT500 New Firmware 1.14

[Jim Sheldon]

WOW is an understatement.  The tuner worked extremely well when I got it a bit over a week ago, but with 1.14 loaded, it's at least an order of magnitude better!  Tunes faster, no apparent glitches and when returning to a frequency that has been tuned before - one click of a relay and the amp sees the same load it saw when first tuned.  I've even tried having it tune things it isn't supposed to - for instance, it will tune my A3S tri-bander on 17 and 12 meters - probably doesn't radiate very well, but it will match it.  The real plus though is my Butternut HF2V vertical with the 160 meter loading coil on it.  The KAT500 will match that antenna on everything.  It is resonant on the bottom end of it's design bands 160, 80 and 40.  The tuner will match it over at least 1800-1900 KHz, the entire 80/75 meter range, all of 40 meters, all of 30 meters and the HF2V when matched by the KAT500 radiates very well on 30 (amp set to 200 watts) and the tuner will find at least a 1.2:1 match through all of 20, 17, 12, 10 and 6 meters.  

I have a fairly low (35 feet) quarter wave inverted L on 160 that I usually use for lower noise receive with the HF2V vertical for transmit, and the tuner will match it for transmit on 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 as well.  It doesn't like it very well but it will usually give me a 1.5:1 match above 50.130.  

Firmware team - my hat's off to you guys and many many thanks for the improvement.  It was good before and it's even better now.  

Thanks!

Jim - W0EB