I replaced my Johnson Matchbox with a Balun Designs tuner balun. The biggest benefit is that the K3 ATU remembers the settings from band to band so the QSY is very rapid. I love watching the DX spots come rolling through on my N3FJP logging program and clicking on them to QSY to that frequency and not have to tune up again. I use it on 80 through 6 meters with an 80m doublet fed with KW ladder line (300 ohm).
My recommendation is to keep the piece of coax from the balun to the rig as short as possible. This is to minimize loss since that line will most likely be highly mis-matched on most bands. There was a QST article not that long ago which detailed the losses in that situation and I was surprised at how high they were. I once had an MFJ balanced RF Ammeter and made measurements of the JMB vs. the balun and they compared favorably. DJ0IP (referenced earlier) has kindly put those measurements on his website. (This is in the FWIW category!) I have not tried to substitute the tuner balun with another type but that might be a future experiment. 73, John W2XS -- Sent from: http://elecraft.365791.n2.nabble.com/ ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
