Testing the new tuner Too (two..whatevs)..

After assembling the 4 States antenna tuner kit, my overall impression was very favorable. Not 100 percent a fan of the kit aspect but about 98.7 percent. My only complaints are trivial: the pictures are somewhat ambiguous on some points and they trail the written instructions so you either pin up 3 sheets of pictures on your work area or leaf back and forth from instructions to the picture pages. Another complaint is that winding of the coil from the instructions is a tad confusing -- even including the pictures. And, thirdly, the polyvaricon caps received in the kit were festooned with connection tabs and it was not clear which tabs should be soldered where.

But these are truly petty gripes when offset by the final result. First, let me share what was learned.

One suspects the coil/switch assembly will be a toughie going in so it is well to prepare and study and prepare some more. Having a spare T106-2 on hand as well as a similar switch, I chose to wind a "practice" switch/inductor assembly for another tuner I am making. After a little struggle, it turned out pretty decently. However, the windings were the same for all twelve positions without the inductive "front loading" or "back loading" single-turn loops on the 4S tuner version. When I have some time, I shall ask why they do that.

Also, David, NM0S, points out that all but the three main tabs are not soldered to the board and can be cut off. In the hopes of clearing up a possible assembly ambiguity, here is the best picture from my build process that shows this.

That said, when I set out to test this, at first I had some difficulty getting it to tune my station antenna. It is a fan dipole for 40, 30, 20, 15, and 10 meters that somehow came together magically in the attic with decent SWRs on all of those bands. It's properties are that it presents a bitch of a time for the autotuners I possess on 17 and 12 meters. The internal K-2 tuner as well as the two LDG Z-11s on 17 or 12 meters have absolute fits! There have been a couple of manual MFJs and the QRPGuys tuner that were unable to obtain a match as well.

So that's the acid test. However, the 4State tuner handled it without breaking a sweat.

Once I got the hang of it, the unit was quite easy to obtain a decent match. The internal SWR bar graph on my FT-817 indicated that the radio was joyous over what it was seeing -- as did an inline Swan dual SWR meter. So, the little tuner will most likely accompany me across the way to the adjacent park and serve well with random long wires thrown up in the towering eucalyptus that abound there.

Anyway, here's some more shots of the resting process:

I just would like to add that it works wonderfully with my NorCal 40A radio. In the course of testing, I hooked up with a couple of folks using that rig and the tuner and got decent reports -- only to discover that I had left the VSWR bridge in line -- probably diminishing the output 990 mW a bit!