Dick,
Warning, a bit of theory talk follows:
I believe your post combined two different aspects of tuners. Matching
range limitations are a fact of life with any tuner design whether
auto-tuner or manual and whether a balanced tuner or an unbalanced tuner.
In my attic I do have an old homebrew, link coupled, tapped plug-in coil
tuner that I can use to match most any load that I can through at it -
it has straps to configure it for series tuning if the impedence is low
and when configured for parallel tuning, will match a very high
impedance. BUT, it is not very good at bandswitching, and if I change
the antenna, I have to set things up again. Those were the 'good old
days' and it worked very well when I was confined to one or two antennas.
As far as balance from a balun output goes, theoretically the output
should be very well balanced if the balun is a proper balun. If you do
not have good balance from a balun, I believe you really should be
asking how your installation differs substantially from the theoretical
model of a balun and solve the problem at its source.
With a good balun at the output of a good unbalanced autotuner, the
balance *should* be perfect. The task of finding out why it may not be
perfect in any one installation may indeed be more difficult than giving
up and simply using a modern balanced tuner even with the drawbacks of
any of the currently available balanced tuners.
For myself, I choose the easy solution for portable operation - the KAT2
followed by a balun works great for me, and at home I have all resonant
antennas so a tuner is not required except for a minor 'touch-up' on the
high end of 75 meters (and I don't operate there very often), so an
unbalanced tuner works fine for my applications.
73,
Don W3FPR
Lamb, Dick & Judy wrote:
I had exactly the same experience as Roel and reached the same
conclusions. I agree that a commercial BALANCED autotuner would be
the best solution for an all-band dipole, if there were such a thing.
snip...
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