'Felt like Tesla'.... that mean sparks all over the place and hair standing on end?? Been there, unfortunately. Try 1500w into a tuner then into the wrong antenna. @#$ thing certainly tried to tune it, but the knobs sort of melted off in the process. Wouldn't recommend that at all. I can do really stupid things when I'm not thinking, or in a hurry, you know?
'MFJ' makes a few very nice tuners, believe it or not! Standard precautions are required, as in shake the thing and see if it rattles. Don't get too enthusiastic with it till you are sure it's right.
Just a few thingys to keep in mind.
Ceramic formed coils are better than ones built of plastic. Heat doesn't affect ceramic as quickly as plastic.
Higher voltages (results of high SWR) usually mean larger components. Expect a big size for a 'healthy' tuner. Higher voltage rated capacitors are not small. In general, bigger is better.
NO tuner will 'stretch' from 'daylight to dark' unless you throw an unbelievable amount of money at it!
Whatever amount of power you expect to run, double that amount and you have the 'smallest' tuner that will probably handle it. Doesn't matter if you never use that amount, bigger is better in that regard.
(That Dentron tuner I have makes for a very nice thingy to set all my equipment on top of. HF, VHF/UHF, meters, the whole smear.)
Even if you design it yourself, there will always be some qwerk about any tuner that you wish were a little bit different. No biggy, just so that you are aware of it.
ALL of the @#$ things have limits! Doesn't matter who makes it, what they say it will do. Just means more fun 'fixing' the antenna.
And one biggy that is seldom mentioned, the average losses using a tuner (correctly!) will be less than the average losses with a mistuned antenna, jockeying with feed line length so that you don't have to use a tuner, etc, etc. You don't have to accept that fact, but it is a fact. Whatever turns you on.
And lastly, no matter which tuner you have, the next one, and the one you had before the last one, will almost always have been 'better'. Especially if you can't find that one you had before...
- 'Doc