needairtime
Member
Seems like tonight there will be a local ARC net talking about "shack gear" and I suspect the SWR meter is one of those indispensables. But what do you do when you don't have one yet?
I was wondering if people have worked with tuning their (homemade too) J-pole, mono, or dipole, and what happens to your SWR when you're 1%, 2%, etc. off of your target wavelength (i.e. for 2m, you're 2cm, 4cm off) - how much does SWR increase? Would a 10% driven element length error double? quadruple? your SWR? As for me I'm trying to target 70cm for now as I do not have a usable 2m radio, so 1% of 70cm would be 7 millimeters which will be tough to get perfect.
Perhaps there's more to it than just this -- making a SWR meter absolutely necessary. The online homemade SWR meter for 2m and shorter seem quite complicated...
The radio I'm using is a LMRS radio, so no signal quality features in it, so I'm screwed there. Actually I do have the schematic that I could possibly jury rig something into the impedance protection circuitry to give me a rough indication of SWR... HMM!!! this might be the easiest avenue to pursue...
I was wondering if people have worked with tuning their (homemade too) J-pole, mono, or dipole, and what happens to your SWR when you're 1%, 2%, etc. off of your target wavelength (i.e. for 2m, you're 2cm, 4cm off) - how much does SWR increase? Would a 10% driven element length error double? quadruple? your SWR? As for me I'm trying to target 70cm for now as I do not have a usable 2m radio, so 1% of 70cm would be 7 millimeters which will be tough to get perfect.
Perhaps there's more to it than just this -- making a SWR meter absolutely necessary. The online homemade SWR meter for 2m and shorter seem quite complicated...
The radio I'm using is a LMRS radio, so no signal quality features in it, so I'm screwed there. Actually I do have the schematic that I could possibly jury rig something into the impedance protection circuitry to give me a rough indication of SWR... HMM!!! this might be the easiest avenue to pursue...