[Elecraft] OT:. G5RV's

[Alan Bloom]

 > It's a pity that too many newcomers, as well as many oldsters, are
 > enamored by this piece of wire.

The G4RV is definitely a compromise antenna.  However its advantage is 
that is has low-enough SWR to be easily matched by most tuners on a 
number of bands.

 > ... the horrific losses that could be incurred even
 > with high quality tuners,

It's true that tuner losses are the manufacturers' dirty little secret. 
Loss is rarely specified, partly because it can be pretty bad, and 
partly because it is hard to measure, but also because it is not 
constant - it depends on the particular impedance being matched.

One exception is the old Drake tuners.  Their Pi-L topology makes the 
loss almost independent of the load impedance.  If you can get it to 
match, you know that almost all the power is going into the feed line. 
For example, the MN-2700 that I designed when I was at Drake was 
specified at 0.5 dB maximum insertion loss and I did a lot of testing 
and tweaking to achieve that on all bands.

Alan N1AL