Antenna Tuner

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rocky28965

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I was given one of these DIY tuner kits.
US $11.55 12% OFF|DIY Kit QRP manual days Antenna Tuner Tune 1 30Mhz For HAM RADIO * CW -in Frequency Meters from Tools on Aliexpress.com | Alibaba Group
My hands arn't much use these days, so got a family member to assemble it & didn't make a bad job either.
I wasn't expecting great things from it, but as I only receive I thought it might be of some advantage.
So far I have tried it between 5MHz - 9MHz on a end fed longwire & it does filter out some of the muck during the day.
Reading some of the reviews on it sugest it isn't designed very well & would work better with different value componants.
I didn't find any sugestions as to what these changes would be.
Bit more info on it here
VK4PK - QRP 1-30MHz Manual Days Antenna Tuner Kit
 

majoco

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Dec 25, 2008
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New Zealand
Tuners work best if you feed them with the wire from the end of the long wire. If you feed them with a balun and a length of coax then you have already done the matching of the antenna to the radio - all the 'tuner' is now going to do is act like a preselector and just reduce the signals that it's not tuned to. If you bring a wire from the long wire to the tuner then all the wire and the downlead can be tuned but you may suffer with noise pickup from your house. Of course the little LED won't light unless you have a very strong station very close by!
 

rocky28965

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Nov 19, 2017
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Otago, NZ
There was a local power cut here last night for about two hours.
What a difference having no interference.
I was able to see just how well my antenna was working.
So now I will have to look at noise supression.
 

scanmanmi

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Sep 25, 2011
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Central Michigan
I got my ham license in the 70's but couldn't afford any of my own equipment so I occasionally worked with a friend or club. Boy would I like to exactly remember what noise levels were like back then. As I remember there was hardly any. We worked international with 5 watts.
 
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