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Power rating of a tuner can often be misleading. Power is one thing while reactance voltages are another. Depending on the antenna impedance is is very possible to cause a 3Kw tuner to arc when running only 1 Kw. I have seen bandswitch contacts flash over to the screws holding the wafers together when considerably less than rated power was being used. I burned up the toroid in my Ten-Tec AT-227 manual tuner which was rated for 200 watts when I was running 100 watts max. I was on 160m at the time messing around with some shortened antenna and heard a SNAP!! every time I keyed up. It was arcing and eventually the plastic former on the toroid actually caught fire. I replaced that stepped toroid with a hand wound toroid with a different ceramic switch and no more problems. remember this was Ten-Tec and not MFJ.

[QUOTE="Captain Kilowatt, post: 515111, member: 39"] Power rating of a tuner can often be misleading. Power is one thing while reactance voltages are another. Depending on the antenna impedance is is very possible to cause a 3Kw tuner to arc when running only 1 Kw. I have seen bandswitch contacts flash over to the screws holding the wafers together when considerably less than rated power was being used. I burned up the toroid in my Ten-Tec AT-227 manual tuner which was rated for 200 watts when I was running 100 watts max. I was on 160m at the time messing around with some shortened antenna and heard a SNAP!! every time I keyed up. It was arcing and eventually the plastic former on the toroid actually caught fire. I replaced that stepped toroid with a hand wound toroid with a different ceramic switch and no more problems. remember this was Ten-Tec and not MFJ. [/QUOTE]

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