Rick,
You have been getting very good answers. You are right, the internal
ATU helps match the rig to the antenna and/or loss is negligible when
you feed the antenna directly or with low loss line (open wire).
However, I have operated with bad setups and still made contacts. I
actually used a low 80m inverted vee (20' at center, 6' at the ends) on
160 and made a few digital contacts. I figure that antenna was 1%
efficient and 99% loss! And I used a similar 40m inverted vee on 30m
and managed to work a VK station via JT-65. IDK maybe that setup was
25% efficient.
A modern rig with an ATU makes the rig more like the boatanchors of the
past that were more flexible in what they load. My old Viking II will
load just about anything and I tried some pretty terrible pieces of
wire for antennas. The only thing it ever failed to load was a 3 ft
metal fishing pole....on 160m!
73,
Ken WA8JXM
On 8/6/16 11:57 PM, rick jones via Elecraft wrote:
OK a very good reality check when you look at the numbers! So I'm still trying to figure out the
usefulness of a built in tuner. Two situations come to mind: You have no feedline and are driving a
wire right out of your rig with a counterpoise (KX3 portable operations) OR you are using it to
just "touch up" the load on the PA from an antenna that is close to resonance. I would
hope that a good Elmer would point out that a built in ATU does nothing more then keep your PA
happy but does nothing toward getting out a good signal AND that if a tuner is necessary, a remote
one is a better choice. Thanks for your patience everyone while I get these concepts
"right". Other forums would not have been as accommodating.
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