Against the advice of several members of this excellent form, I went ahead and purchased at 828 from mfg. I purchased it because it has the frequency counter and the cross needle SWR/ power / reflected. Digital and analog . The frequency counter would have come in handy had I gotten around to using the EF Johnson Ranger. I begin using it with the Madison and phantom, but began having problems soon after the purchase. It's under warranty, but after calling MFJ realized that the person I spoke to is either inept or just didn't want to bother helping me. I set the warning led and sound beep for 1. 3:9. With 20 Watts swing from my medicine on SSB the meter works fine. Anything above 100 watts sets the warning light and the audible tone to let me know the SWR is super high and the cross needles are wide open one to the extreme left and the other to the extreme right. After a second the needles do drop down to the correct SWR/ output. The digital meter also shows the highest SWR that the digits will allow for that one second, but like the analog cross needles drops down the same time the cross needles due to the correct output and SWR reading. the warning light and audible stop. It's almost as if as soon as key up and add audio there's nothing between the amplifier and transceiver. No antenna for that one second or so.. I have two other meters which granted are not true PEP meters nore high-quality meters, but both give me the same SWR reading , Which is acceptable. It's still under warranty and I will be sending it back shortly. The advice I received from the MFJ employee was to shut the audible warning Off because the meters working the way it supposed to. I'm not buying that. If the warning light and audible should be shut off because they are warning me there's a problem for that initial key up, they should be part of the meter. Shutting them off kind of defeats what they're there for. How can it be possible that in any mode weather in the 1500 watt mode or the auto output recognition the warning light and audible tone go off and show an SWR that's off the chart, for about a second at that point the cross needles which are wide open drop down to the cross position and the digital side also drops down to show the proper SWR an output. Does anyone else have this meter and if so is this the way it's supposed to work? I was just curious, either way it's going back to MFJ I will not put my equipment in any danger due to a POS. I wish I would have listened to the WWDX members that said MFJ is junk. Buy Dawia!
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