Antenna Tuner For Your Ham Radio Shack

Right now I have two different antenna tuners for my ham shack. I have an MFJ-949E Antenna tuner. This is a manual antenna tuner. It will tune it will tune dipoles, inverted v antennas, beams, verticals, mobile whip antennas, scanner antennas and shortwave antennas. I use it with my 10 to 80 meter dipole antenna. It does a pretty good job at tuning to a low swr reading. The only drawback I have found with it is that the knobs are not very comfortable and after awhile your fingers get sore. As far as tuning goes I wrote down the various settings for different frequencies. I keep a chart handy so I can easily tune to the frequency I am on using my Kenwood TS-2000 Ham Radio. I have tuned frequencies from about 1.8mhz to 30mhz. I would recommend it to anyone as a manual tuner if you are running np more than 300 watts.
  My other antenna tuner is a MFJ 993b automatic antenna tuner. It pretty much covers the same Ham Frequencies as the MFJ 949E antenna tuner. It does take a little getting used to with all the different settings and button choices. However once it is set up it works like a charm. It does only go up to 300 watts so do not go higher than that. The only problem that I ran into was with the on off power button. It last somewhere between 3 months to a year and then it has to be replaced. I had replaced it with switches from MFJ quite a few times and decided to do something different. I replaced the on off switch with a good toggle switch. I wrote about this in an earlier post. I have no had any more problems with the switch since then. This is my main antenna tuner at this time.
  There are quite a few good antenna tuners made by MFJ despite the varying reviews I have read. There are other brands of antenna tuners that have caught my eye. Some of those brands are Palstar, Ameritron, Vectronics and LDG Electronics. I really like the Palstar Antenna Tuners, but they are out of my budget at this time. I do have to say the reviews are very good and they look like they are built like tank. I also like the high end automatic tuner in the LDG Electronics line. I read the reviews and they seem to be pretty good. For myself I am not running an amplifier at this time and have no need for one. Maybe one day in the future I will be looking more at one of them. Also most Base Ham Radios have an antenna tuner built in them that usually is good up to 100watts.
 Thank You for reading 73s from Dan KC2YTI