Sunday, January 10, 2021

Antenna SWR Chart

 

Click on chart image for a larger view

Spent some time in the shack this weekend moving cabling around and inserting the new LDG auto tuner in the previous blog post.

Whenever I make changes like this I like to test everything on the antenna analyzer to make sure the SWR doesn't change and also refresh my memory on which HF antenna provides the best SWR on each band.

As part of the process, this new chart was made and will be printed and placed at eye-level from my main operating position.

Key information presented in the chart;

  • Tuner input by name
  • Antenna assignment in the tuner
  • Antenna by name
  • All HF bands that are workable on either antenna.
  • All SWR levels from the approximate center of each band,
  • Color coding, green for SWR of 1 to 3. yellow for SWR of 3 - 5, orange for SWR of 5 - 10
  • In the blue cells, I identify the bottom and top frequencies for each band.
  • And finally, the grey cells identify the center band frequencies that I use when testing the SWR on each antenna with the antenna analyzer.
Happy to confirm that with just 2 HF antennas there are 8 HF bands that I can operate on with an SWR of 2:1 or lower. And I can push that up to 10 bands with the help of the tuner.

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