[ICOM] IC-718 antenna tuning and SWR

[kb8rtz at oh.rr.com]

Good evening,

I have an IC-718 and am attempting to narrow an SWR issue with a new Hustler 6BTV. The last few days have been frustrating to say the least. The instructions in the Tx manual say to set the power above 30W, set the operating mode to either CW or RTTY, set the display to show SWR; tune to a frequency and push the PTT button. Realized that I didn't follow the PTT instruction and have instead been pushing the DIT command on the electronic microphone keyer to check SWR.

Anyway, on 10m the SWR seemed just fine using the CW DIT command. On all bands (10-15-20-40 check so far) while in CW mode and pushing PTT the SWR reads 1:1 or less. While in RTTY mode the SWR on 10m slopes upward from 1.75:1 at the low end to 2.5:1 at the high end. The SWR in CW mode and pushing the DIT command the SWR was even higher.

My questions are:
Why when pushing PTT in CW mode there is no SWR reading?
Why when pushing PTT in RTTY mode there is SWR?
Why when pushing DIT command on the electronic microphone keyer there is SWR?
The last question comes from the manual stating to set to either CW or RTTY then push PTT to read the SWR.

Thanks much.

73...Patrick...KB8RTZ...