Tuner Genius on a loop antenna

John Chmielewski

I recently bought a Turner Genius. One of the antennas I use it on is a 160-meter horizontal loop. The best match I can get on 20-meters is 1.5:1. The raw swr is 4:1. When I use this antenna with a Palstar HF auto I can get a 1:1 match on any part of the band. FW is 1.2.9 on the Tuner Genius. I tried to get a ticket open on the 4O3A site, but it will not let me register. The Tuner Genius works well on all the other antennas I use. Although The final SWR solution is always higher than I can get in the Palstar. Anyone have any ideas?

John N2XD

Mike-VA3MW

Glad you got it figured out. You might find even changing a feedline length by 10 feet gives you a totally different result.

BTW, there is nothing wrong with an SWR of anything less than 2:1. And, I have been doing that for about 1/2 a century. :)

While I have a TGXL, I almost never use it, but it makes a great remote Watt and SWR meter. :)

Mike-VA3MW

John

What do you have the minimum SWR set for on the TGXL? It is a user setting that you can adjust from the front panel of the TGXL. Section 5.1 of the user guide.

I think out of the box, the minimum is 1.5:1.

John Chmielewski

No joy Mike. I tried the minimum swr setting. I'm one of these guys that reads the manual. I also tried to manually tune with the TGXL and the best I can get is 1.6:1 on 20M. Seeing as how 4O3A won't let me in there web site. I guess I will use the Palstar. I hate to say it but it appears the the HF Auto is a better tuner. I just do not like to pay good money for something that does not function at 100%. The alturnative is to buy another HR Auto to do SO2R. Thanks anyway.

John N2XD

John Chmielewski

Good news here in the Smokey Mountains. After thinking about this most of the night I realized that it was band specific(20M). So today I retrieved my box of Mix 31 ferrites and started to go to work. Now I get the same results on the TGXL as I do on the HF-Auto. I do not quite understand why the TGXL needs the extra protection but it does. I am a happy Flex camper once again.

John N2XD

Mark Smith - KB5KYX

I haven't had any problems tuning my 80m loop with the TGXL. The SWR is less than 1.2:1, even on 75m which is over 4:1 without the tuner. I don't use this antenna on 75m, but it does tune a high SWR with no problem. I have ferrites on my coax before it gets to the TGXL and a 4:1 balun with a 1:1 choke at the loop antenna end. I cut my 80m loops to lowest SWR on 3.5Mhz and all bands 80m to 10m are less than 1.5:1 without the PGXL except 75m and 17m which are 4:1 and 1.9:1 respectively. The TGXL will also tune my 80m loop on 160m which has an SWR of over 9:1, but my Antenna Genius burned up in the process. I totally forgot about the Antenna Genius being inline and the effects of a high SWR and high power on that unit, so expensive lesson learned! I don't know what the SWR limit on the Antenna Genius is, but it's less than 9:1...LOL. Before I had the Antenna Genius inline I ran high power through my wire antennas with coax at SWR's up to 3:1 for over 7 years with no coax problem, so I would consider that to be a good upper limit SWR for coax. Anything higher than 3:1 SWR, and you should use twin-lead.

WX7Y

Every Station is different and if you are on a restricted size lot and the Antenna is close by try adding 20 or 30 extra feet of Coax to the coax run it may just help.

I have a 160 Meter Loop here and I feed it with a home brew 2KW 9:1 Balun to 100 feet of 450 OHM Ladder Line and at the fed point with 18 MIX31 beads at the Coax Feed point before it comes in to the shack and I can tune it ABOUT anywhere from 160 to 6 Meter excluding 12 meters with the TGXL and run Full legal limit.

The reason for the 9:1 balun is easy 50 input to 450 OHM Impedance (50 Ohms X 9=450 Ohms impedance).

The reason for the Ladder line is because of less loss then Coax by far for the 150' feed line run and gives me the added bonus of making the Antenna easily tunable for the other bands.

73's WX7Y

Bret