My understanding of a tuner is to just deliver an impedance at the radio. Sooooo if the radio is happy but I am only delivering half of my actual power to radiation then shouldn't I try to better the antenna and remove the tuner?
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Does a tuner really "help"
- Thread starter NeoHam
- Start date
You are feeding your coax heat, depends on how far off your antenna is from the actual frequency tx'd on.
Shouldn't you make the antenna work 'better' so that you don't need a tuner? Yes, if you have that choice then that's certainly what you should do. But what if you don't have that choice, what if you are trying to make an antenna not designed for some particular band work on that 'wrong' band? Then a tuner is certainly one option.
A better option would be in placing that tuner at the feed point of the antenna instead of at the transmitter end of the feed line, that'd make even the losses of a non-resonant antenna much more acceptable. Then that tuner would be called an impedance matching circuit, sort of like a gamma/beta match, right? Except it would be variable so could match more than just one 'band'. The problem with that is that it'd take awful long arms to reach that tuner to retune it when necessary.
One way to lessen the losses resulting from using a tuner (at the transmitter end) is by using a feed line that doesn't have so much loss, or that isn't damaged by impedance mismatches. Unfortunately, coax feed line is very susceptible to that 'damage' thingy.
There would still be some loss from using an antenna not resonant, or close to resonant for a band. No way around that really, but the losses can be minimized. The point of diminishing returns involves the cost, complexity, and inconvenience of putting that tuner in the place where it will do the most good. A crappy antenna is still better than no antenna at all.
- 'Doc
A better option would be in placing that tuner at the feed point of the antenna instead of at the transmitter end of the feed line, that'd make even the losses of a non-resonant antenna much more acceptable. Then that tuner would be called an impedance matching circuit, sort of like a gamma/beta match, right? Except it would be variable so could match more than just one 'band'. The problem with that is that it'd take awful long arms to reach that tuner to retune it when necessary.
One way to lessen the losses resulting from using a tuner (at the transmitter end) is by using a feed line that doesn't have so much loss, or that isn't damaged by impedance mismatches. Unfortunately, coax feed line is very susceptible to that 'damage' thingy.
There would still be some loss from using an antenna not resonant, or close to resonant for a band. No way around that really, but the losses can be minimized. The point of diminishing returns involves the cost, complexity, and inconvenience of putting that tuner in the place where it will do the most good. A crappy antenna is still better than no antenna at all.
- 'Doc
