Do I really need an external antenna tuner?

A lot of amateur radio operators question why they would want an external antenna tuner if their radio already has one built in? A better question might be, “Why do radio manufacturers put an autotuner in the radio that will only tune an antenna that is already resonant?” That’s right: check the specs on your $5,000 piece of cutting edge HF technology and you’ll probably find that it will only tune antennas that have an SWR as high as 3:1. Heck, most installations of the popular G5RV wire antenna design have an SWR higher than that on the vast majority of the ham bands!

Tune Button on the Yaesu FT-DX5000

Tune Button on the Yaesu FT-DX5000



So what good is the internal antenna tuner? Well, if you happen to have an antenna that’s pretty much tuned to your favorite operating frequency and you don’t move around much, or you have a mono-band beam, it’s probably useful for those situations. But for the vast majority of hams operating on HF, there are many times where their antenna system has an SWR higher than 3:1 and they’re either in danger of damaging their radio, or their radio is reducing power as a self-preservation measure.


So do you really need an external antenna tuner? The answer is: probably so. And if you choose a auto-tuner like the MFJ-939, you’ll have a visual and audible alert when the SWR is so high it can’t be tuned to an acceptable level.


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