Here is a good one I was watching a Video on swr. The guy say high swr is better than low .With high swr you can transmit farther. Now this is from Clays radio shop here in Texas. Is this for real??
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High Swr??
- Thread starter undertaker
- Start date
Typical truck stop CB hack tech. SWRS and 18 ft, 36 ft coax length. Most likely thinks 1/2 and full wave lengths. Not looking at the velocity factor.
Rich
Rich
Are you talking about this video? On that topic what he is saying is true, but it really needs to have been worded better. I had to get into his explanation to understand what he was trying to say. A few notes.
What he said about the purpose of tuning SWR, and that is only to protect your equipment, is absolutely true. A lot of people won't want to believe this, but SWR, in and of itself, has nothing to do with antenna system performance.
Just because your SWR is not a perfect match does not mean that the antenna will perform better than if it were a perfect match. In the video he gets into something called "field strength", which is measured with a field strength meter. That is a device that measures the actual strength of the radiated signal. If you work with a field strength meter in conjunction with an SWR meter on enough antennas you very quickly learn that the low SWR point is almost never the maximum field strength point. Just like there is a low SWR point, there is also a maximum field strength point for the antenna.
Its to bad more people don't purchase and use field strength meters. They really aren't that expensive (MFJ sells two for under $50).
However, what he said about the 18 foot length of coax benefiting you, he is just plain wrong on that front. If you want to know why feel free to do a search on this forum, or I guess if you are lazy you could simply ask...
The DB
You are welcome to believe as you wish. If you think the extra work that you put in getting that SWR that extra little bit lower will make any difference, well its your waste of time for no gain you will ever notice, so have fun.
SWR tells you far less than most people think.
Me, personally, I prefer to be a bit more thorough. I'll use the equipment that cost me much more than the antenna on every antenna that I set up, troubleshoot, or get the chance to get my hands on, and I will not only have fun, but also piece of mind that I know that it was set up properly and it is working like it should. Hell, on a good day I might even get out my grid dip meter just for kicks...
I do enjoy playing with antennas though...
The DB
I'm going to assume this guy was talking about run of the mill mobile installs, and the ones I've done tuned flat out of the box with an SWR meter and looked good enough to me on a 259b. If you want to sweep a $50 11m antenna with a $1000 analyser and play with field strength, bonding, coils, grid dips etc, it'll be your time wasted not mine. Every Wilson I've had took longer to install than to tune, and I'd bet a doughnut it performed as well as yours after all your analysing.
Now if you want to talk about homebrewing multiband base antennas, that's an entirely different story and a simple SWR meter won't even begin to tell the whole story, you won't even be able to see the whole picture let alone resonant points. But I think that's beyond the scope of this thread since it's targeted at commercially built and sold antennas for specific bands of operation.
I still say the average user installing a commercially available antenna has no reason to run out and purchase an analyser, field strength meter and grid dip meter when a decent SWR meter will do the job.
In a perfect world this would be absolutely correct. Unfortunately the world we live in is no where near perfect. I have several experiences with new monoband antennas that appear to be flat and low with an SWR meter but the antennas have been anything but. Earlier this year I looked at a new Wilson 1000 that had a flat SWR curve from the 20 meter ham band up past the 2 meter ham band. The shop used their 259b and said it was fine, I used my VNA and found that it wasn't, not even close...
If the antenna is functioning within its designed parameters out of the box, which more and more lately I see not happening, then yes you will get acceptable performance with just an SWR meter to tune with. You don't even have to get SWR as low as you can.
Perhaps its wasting my time, or maybe its pride, but if I am going to look someone in the eye and tell them that their antenna is working I am going to make sure it is working. It doesn't matter is if it is a giant homebrew multiband antenna, or a single band mobile antenna, or whatever, it gets checked. I'm not going to trust that someone else did their job correctly before me, I'm going to make sure. They will also get a plot of the antenna's tune that I tell them to file away in case it is needed for comparison later... With all the referrals I get a friend tells me I should start charging...
I guess our experiences differ. I've seen to many new or near new antennas from "quality" brands that don't work as they should out of the box with a simple SWR meter's tune, although honestly, those tend to be more memorable than the ones that work out of the box. There is also the fact that people don't seek people like me out unless they think they have a problem, so I'm more likely to see a problem than the average person purchasing an antenna off the shelf...
The DB