I think you have arrived at a good understanding of the benefits/limitations of
both the StepIR and the remote tuner approaches. I use the remote tuner
approach, but would think that the StepIR should give similar results. And, as
you point out, the total costs of the two approaches are somewhat similar.
Most of the manual labor is involved with the radial field, which is a constant
for any approach.
There are a couple of less expensive alternatives if you are mostly interested
in a couple/few bands rather than the complete 80 thru 10 range. All of these
vertical element heights can be attained with a light weight fiberglas mast of
at most 40 ft. This is easy to put up and take down. I can do mine in less
than 2 minutes. So the least expensive approach would be to use different
element lengths for your bands of interest and making them resonant so that no
tuner is required.
Another option would be to use the 43 ft height and customized relay selected
matching networks in an enclosure at the base for your bands of interest - say
40, 30 and 20. This is fairly easy to accomplish at the 100W level. If the
number of networks is reasonable (3 in this example), this customized tuner can
be constructed for significantly less expense than purchasing a new autotuner.
In this example you could reduce expenses further by making the vertical
resonant on 30 and using only two matching networks for 40 and 20.
73 Craig AC0DS
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