Seeing the threads on the KPA500 and auto tuner problems, I've noticed a possible anomaly in the K3's internal auto tuner. I have a very close to resonant inverted L for 160 meters and a 3 wire fan dipole for 40, 30 and 17 meters. 40 and 17 are resonant exactly where I want them, but due to a malfunction in MY math, I got the 30 meter set about a foot too short.
On 160, I started noticing that the K3 would not tune even close to under 2:1 near the resonant frequency of the L on the first pass. If I hit tune again and sometimes needed to do it a third time, it would bring it down to 1:0 on the display and as long as I retuned every time I moved 10 KHz or so, it would tune 1:0 on the first pass. This shows up on all bands in varying degrees if I happen to leave the tuner in auto rather than bypass on antennas that are actually resonant at or near the frequency I'm trying to tune. If I bypass the tuner, I usually see 1.1:1 or 1.2:1 swr with the PA not complaining at all. Is this supposed to be this way or is it an anomaly in the tuning algorithm?
It's doing the same thing now on the 30 meter band but that may be expected due to the fact that the set of wires for 30 is actually resonant up around 10.5 MHz so I'm not at issue with that.
Jim - W0EB
K3 #5027
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