For what it may be worth, I'm a staunch supporter of antenna tuners
myself. I previously used one for many years to get 5 band operation
out of two vertical pieces of tubing on my roof back when I lived in
Scottsdale, and I just built a high power monster to get full coverage
of the low bands with my current antennas here in the boonies. I'm
definitely not one of those who think that antennas need to be resonant
to be any good.
Antenna tuners can indeed be lossy, but with the right components they
don't have to be, and if they are lossy enough to significantly affect
your signal most of them will burn up first. TLW, the free app that
comes with the ARRL Antenna Book, is quite informative on that score.
My gripe with the original post from G3UNA was simply his generalization
that resonant antennas are bad and that non-resonant antennas are good.
73,
Dave AB7E
On 8/1/2020 11:21 AM, Al Lorona wrote:
I'm glad Dave added that to the end of his message, because each time the topic of multiband antennas comes up, we are
told, "That's too lofty a goal for one antenna. Just put up a resonant antenna and all your troubles will be
gone." All except for the problem of operating on all bands without having to put up 9 resonant HF antennas, that
is. I think we do a disservice to the hundreds of hams reading this by discouraging them from multiband operation just
because we deem it too "noisy" or "lossy" or "inconvenient" or whatever.
If a man or woman, knowing full well the consequences of his or her actions,
chooses to utilize a single, horizontal antenna of no particular length,
ultra-low-loss feedline long enough to reach the shack, and a low-loss homebrew
or commercial manual antenna tuner to operate on all bands, then who are we to
tell him or her that they shouldn't? To do so has always struck me as
presumptuous.
Incidentally, can we do two things? Can we all get over the gross assumption that we
continue to make, that when someone mentions feeding an antenna with "balanced
line" that must mean Wireman #553? There are better alternatives. If our beef is
with Wireman #553, then let's be on with it without condemning *all* forms of balanced
line.
Secondly, antenna tuners are not necessarily lossier than the aggregate of cables,
connectors, wattmeters, filters, switches, elbows, lightning arrestors, baluns,
autotuners, &c., &c., that many folks use. Everything has loss, but in effect
we trade that loss for some other valuable function... like being able to QSY anwhere,
easily. To give you a data point, on 12 meters my station has a max loss (from
transmitter to the antenna feedpoint) of 1.6 dB. I'll put that worst-case number up
against anybody's long run of coax through all the other junk from their transmitter to
their antenna.
Folks, you should not feel inferior for having chosen to operate on many bands
with an antenna tuner. I think the case could be made that the *resonant*
antenna is the compromise, giving up all band operation for some other desired
function. And sadly, sometimes that compromise is made just so they can say
that they're not using a tuner!
Al W6LX
Multi-band antennas are fine as long as you recognize that they are a
compromise.
Dave AB7E
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