Initial test of the LDG remote antenna tuner! Well I used up an entire day playing with this thing.

First I climbed up my tower and stuck it in line with my fan dipole (80/75/40/20 meter elements) about 10 feet from the feed point. I was able to tune up with less that 1.2 SWR on every part of every HF band even 160 and I don't have a 160 antenna. Impressive! And with no knobs to adjust. But the question is: is it better than my current transmatch?. I then took it down from the tower to make some actual measurements to see what difference it makes on output power when it is located remotely as opposed to by the transmitter like my conventional tuner. I have 300 feet of old RG58 coax that someone gave me a long time ago and have never used . I first connected the far end to a Bird watt meter and then to a 50 Ohm dummy load and the near end to the transmitter and a Bird watt meter. The sequence was Transmitter wattmeter 300 ft coax wattmeter dummy load. 100 watts forward at 29 MHz resulted in 0 reflected (SWR 1:1) however there was 83.3 watts lost due to the cable loss.(7.8db). Power to the dummy load was 16.7 watts. This gave me a baseline to compare against. Next I connected the LDG tuner to the far end of the coax, put the power injector in line near the transmitter and repeated the measurement. No surprise there was no noticeable difference. Next I removed the 50 ohm dummy load and substituted a 200 ohm resistor across the output to simulate a 4:1 antenna load mismatch and put my conventional tuner back in line near the transmitter and tuned it until it matched and indicated 100 watts forward / 0 reflected. I then checked the output at the far end. This time the output to the load was only 10.1 watts. It appears that there was an additional 1.9 db loss due to the higher SWR. I put a larger resistor in to simulate an 8:1 mismatch and then only got 6.25 watts output to the load (additional 4db loss due to SWR) Finally, I put the LDG tuner in line near the load and removed my conventional tuner and repeated the measurements. With the 4:1 mismatch at the load, the output was 16.6 watts. With the 8:1 mismatch the output was 16.6 watts. The transmitter was seeing a 1:1 SWR in both cases and it appears the additional loss in the coax due to SWR was eliminated. Just for grins, I put a 600 ohm resistor in to simulate a 12:1 SWR. (the LDG is rated for up to a 16:1 match). It tuned right up within seconds and the output to the load was once again 16.6 watts. SUMMARY These were very basic tests with resistive loads and more testing with some complex impedances needs to still be done. However the results indicate that there is a significant advantage having the tuner located near the antenna, particularly if you have long coax runs or are using high loss coax like RG58. If you are using a total of 50 foot or less of Beldon 9913 or some other low loss coax, you will not see much of a signal increase. On

the other hand if your tower is located 100 foot or more from your shack or if you bought cheap coax, the difference will be significant enough to warrant the purchase of this item. Also there is a convenience factor involved. Not having to manually tune the transmatch (switch the inductor, adjust the output cap, adjust the input cap, repeat) is definitely a plus especially for contesters! Bottom Line: Even though my tower is only 25 foot from my shack and I use low loss coax, every db counts and I WANT ONE! Anyone wanna buy a MFJ versa tuner cheap?