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A match box
- Thread starter Joe50
- Start date
Standing Wave Ratio. It is a measurement of how much of your signal is going out of your antenna to how much is bounced back to the radio. A theoretical perfect match is 1 to 1, but in reality you are okay as long as you are under 2:1.
The lower that reading is, the more power is being transmitted out of the antenna and not lost. Also, if that ratio gets too high, it can burn out the amplifier of your transmitter, which will make it so you can't talk to anyone.
An antenna tuner can make it so that you don't have too much reflected power coming back to the radio, but it basically just absorbs it instead of making it go out the antenna. It also introduces some loss into the system, so even if your antenna is perfectly tuned, it will not broadcast as much power through the antenna as you could without it.
A match-box ( back in the day ) was used to help set SWR on a dual antenna set up. I used one on a pick-up truck with a pair of 108'' fiberglass whips, worked great.
Welcome to the forum.
This is a old thread, but.....
With the proper co phase harness you should be able to get the swr down to a acceptable level with dual antennas.
Ideally a transmatch or antenna tuner is used when you try to cover more bands or frequency spread than a antenna can cover alone.
73
Jeff
