I am thinking that there is a potential new product to be developed. An auto-tuner that can fill the gaps that the other great products miss (e.g. Palstar AT-AUTO). Or, maybe Elecraft is thinking along these lines.
For a full legal limit antenna coupler, I submit the following "wish-list" new features or enhancements to the existing state of the art: (1) Separate the controls and displays into a control head desk top type unit and leave the actual tuning hardware with all of its bulk in another box to be hidden away somewhere (maybe even outside in the weather). Connection cable should be high-speed serial (e.g. USB). Comment: legal limit tuners can sometimes be huge things and they would take up a lot of valuable space on a desktop. Surely we can separate them. (2) Provide for multiple input/output ports. Ideally something like at least two radio+amplifier inputs and possibly even 4. And, multiple antenna outputs, probably 4. I would not include a balanced line output since a good current balun should be an independent choice for a particular antenna and not something built into the tuner. Also, the location for the current balun is not necessarily the same location as the tuner (i.e. the separate box as per item 1 above). (3) Given the multiple radio-amplifier input and antenna output ports, the logic and memory choices for a match are port dependent and that information should be in the memory storage. Program logic in the tuner should allow for the unique attributes of each radio. I am suggesting that once a radio and amplifier combination is associated with a given input port that their may be some software configuration necessary so this is not a dynamic (during operation) changeable setup. (4) Interface cables may be needed to be connected to the radio (tuner control) and to amplifier for amp bypass. Ideally it would seem that such cables can be daisy-chained to minimize cable complexity with the tuner logic properly blocking out radios that are not selected. Only one input port can be selected at a time. Of course, there may be even better and simpler ways to do this. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
