Palstar AT5K HF Antenna Tuner. Close up inspection
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- Опубліковано 21 сер 2024
- For the cost of the Palstar AT5K antenna tuner one would think that quality control would be a bit better. I will say this though, nobody and nothing is perfect including me. Trust me, I have a few screws loose myself lol. Hopefully from here on I will have many years of trouble free operation.
Not sure if your planning to use the balance feed option but better verify the relay is operating correctly. Most newer ones left palstar missed wired. When the button on front panel is out the relay is open with 12v applied. You can verify by lifting the balun shield at the cap retaining screw at rear of input cap lift the ground and see if your relay is grounded 😉 I also posted a vid of my mongo balun modification check it out. I took stock 31 cores out and upgraded to Amidom k cores x4 with 14turns of rg400 coax, it gives the AT5K better balance and common mode choking ability 😉
Please loose the Balun, hook your Balance ladder line directly to the wing nuts on the back of the Tuner. The path to least resistance.
Hey Art, thanks for the advice and thank you sir for stopping by.
I had the digital one like that
Hey bud. I'm guessing you mean an auto tuner. So far this unit is working great. I was on 80 meters last night running about 500 watts and it was rock solid.
KP68 - I was always told that antenna tuners really didn't work. That they "trick" your radio in believing the SWR is lower than it really is. Is that true?
Hello Samuel, glad to hear from you. I hope all is well with you and the family. Well, no and yes to your question. The term "antenna tuner" is quite misleading as it does not tune the antenna but converts a mismatch of a non resonant antenna at specific frequency to 50 ohms. Ideally one would have a resonant antenna for a specific frequency span or single band operation, but for multi band operations this could become quite unfeasible as you would need a multitude of antennas to cover the entire HF spectrum. If all you are going to operate on is 1 band or a narrow band like 11m,12m, 15m, 17m, etc.. 1 antenna cut or tuned for that particular frequency is all you need. In my case I use a coaxial fed 80 meter wire loop and even if I only wanted to transmit on 80 meters, which covers huge frequency span, with the antenna length to be resonant at 3.800, venturing not to far up or down from 3.800 the SWR rises rapidly. The tuner is a very convenient way to tune out the mismatch so my transceiver will always see close to 50 ohms and I can cover the entire 80 meter band with 1 antenna. In a nut shell, you can operate on multiple bands and frequencies with 1 antenna but at the cost of loss which the tuner must dissipate. So do they trick your radio? Kind of, sort of, lol. Do they work? You bet they do! Thank you Samuel for stopping by sir!
every time I see one open I keep asking myself WHY so expensive??? there is not costly microprocessors etc. aHHH, oh , and if you go with the automatic one then you better sale a kidney first. Thats why is so hard to buy Made in USA stuff because it looks like people putting electronics together get paid $200 an hour I guess. Im definitely in the wrong career