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| Reviews Summary for Bliss Match Master |
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Reviews: 5
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Average rating: 4.8/5
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MSRP: $300.00 to 1200.00
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Description: A "Balanced Balanced" Legal Limit Plus Antenna Tuner
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More info: http://www.tomstubes.com
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You can
write your own review of the Bliss Match Master.
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K5UJ
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Rating: 4/5
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May 27, 2005 14:08
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Solid and functional
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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Bliss Z Matchmaster Product Review
Air and Water King, Inc.
31345 Hwy 184
Dolores CO 81323 USA
Voice 970-882-5477
Fax 970-882-3922
http://airwaterkinginc.purification.com/bzmmremotemotor.html
This is a review of the Bliss Z Matchmaster high power balanced feedline transmatch. This review is the third part in a series of reviews of off the shelf products for some of the elements in an antenna system I constructed. This antenna is a horizontal loop of 1 lambda on 75 meters that is held up with MFJ 33 foot fiberglass poles, and fed with 600 ohm open wire feedline which is tuned with the Bliss Matchmaster. I have reviewed the W7FG feedline and MFJ fiberglass poles elsewhere (http://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/822 and http://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/4165 respectively).
I purchased the Matchmaster model BZMM160-10 with the Daiwa CN-801H swr meter installed about two and a half years ago.
This is a manual legal limit unit that appears to no longer be available. The Bliss line seems to be all motorized versions now. The cost of this model was $799.00 not including shipping. There was a certain amount of humor associated with the name. Some hams said it sounded more like a Zenn computer dating service than a transmatch.
The Matchmaster is a feedline matching network that is intended to transform the impedance and balance of parallel wire feedline to 50 ohm unbalanced coaxial feedline. Its chief components to perform this function are:
A 1:1 bead balun made with approximately 12 inches of RG303 teflon coax,
A 7 – 1000 pf vacuum variable capacitor,
A pair of 30 uH roller inductors,
And an enclosed relay for switching the capacitor between the antenna and transmitter side of the inductors. These items plus other hardware such as connectors, the SWR bridge, and wiring are housed in an attractive wood cabinet finished with a dark blue veneer.
I believe the roller inductor synchronization used by Bliss is superior to what is found in more recent commercially available balanced networks for hams. Instead of two inductors side by side and tied together with a belt on a pulley, Bliss places both inductors end to end on a common threaded shaft. The taps are fixed and the coils move. This solves the problem of breaking belts and inductor creep, in which one side’s inductance looses step with the other. In fact, it is my understanding that another manufacturer of balanced networks has discontinued their belt driven design and is moving to the method employed by Bliss. The Bliss inductors were wound on plastic coil forms; not air wound.
My interest in balanced tuners began with a search for a fairly good 75 meter antenna that would fit on my 50 by 100 foot lot, which was not even large enough to accommodate a center fed horizontal Zepp ½ wave long. At roughly the same time I came across two terrific solutions to my problem: R.L. Cebik’s website, in which he describes how an 88 foot long center fed Zepp can be made to work on 80 m. on up (http://www.cebik.com), and Kirk Klindschmit’s well written article in QST in which he chronicled his search for a good all band HF antenna, the horizontal loop (http://www.arrl.org/members-only/tis/info/pdf/0204047.pdf). I immediately realized I had the solutions to my space problem before me, as I could fit, albeit barely, a 1 wave horizontal loop for 80 m. on my property. Two key components for making this work would be open wire feed and a balanced tuner (especially since the loop would wind up resonating at 4 MHz). I decided to start with the center fed Zepp as described on Cebik’s website and eventually expand it to become a loop. The first thing I had to do was get a balanced tuner, along the lines of what Rich Measure’s described in his QST article and available here: http://www.somis.org/bbat.html
At the time, only John Bliss was making these. I balked at the price thinking that this was something I could homebrew, but I was also suffering from get-there-itis, and had a feeling a tuner homebrew project would languish along with the some odd 10 other “projects” I have here and there around my house. I rationalized that if the tuner and open wire feed added several db to my signal over the losses of a high SWR on coax, the improvement would be a bargain compared to paying for a high powered amplifier (we hams can always figure out a justification for buying gear if we work at it).
I spoke with Mr. Bliss on the telephone and after a couple of pleasant conversations, we reached an understanding as to what sort of tuner I wanted (non-motorized legal limit; Daiwa meter) and I placed an order. This is not a company with an assembly line. This is a man making these tuners by hand in a shop. Be prepared to wait. Mine took about two months.
I am currently using it to tune to 50 ohms unbalanced, about 40 feet of 600 ohm parallel wire feedline, to a 230 foot long horizontal loop that is about 30 feet high. The loop is rectangular with the feedpoint in the middle of one long side. I routinely operate this antenna on 20 to 80 meters and have also operated it up through 10 meters. This is not a dx antenna, particularly on the low bands (but it does have low noise pickup), however it is an excellent ragchew antenna, which is what I like to do. In my return to HF, I started out with a Gap Titan vertical, which proved to be a reasonable compromise between performance, and multiband coverage, on 15, 17 and 20 meters. However on 40 and (especially) 80 meters I thought I might do better with something else, given the Gap’s small size. The laws of physics prevailed: It is hard to beat a full sized antenna. In A/B testing between the Gap and the center fed Zepp on 40 m., the Zepp came out ahead by 10 db. Later I found the loop added another 15 db to my signal over the Zepp, for a 25 db improvement over the Gap. Where I previously had to run an amplifier almost all the time on 40 to achieve an armchair copy signal with the Gap, I now could often go with the exciter only on the loop.
On receive, not surprisingly, since it is a low to the ground horizontal antenna, the loop was as much as 5 S units lower noise than the Gap. Impulse noise received by the Gap would completely disappear on the Loop.
Installation and operation of the Matchmaster is straightforward. You connect your load (parallel wire) to the rear panel lugs, connect a ground strap to the ground lug on the rear panel (this should be a short run to an external ground rod) and connect an unbalanced coaxial jumper to the UHF female also on the rear panel. It does not include a bypass switch, however in the case of an unbalanced to balanced matching network, a bypass isn’t really necessary. To put it another way, if you wanted to bypass the Matchmaster, you would be operating with a balun of the appropriate transformation ratio in your feedline, and not be bothering with the transmatch in the first place. There are two ways to tune the transmatch. You may transmit a weak cw signal into the Matchmaster and adjust the coil and capacitors for minimal reflected power on the built-in meter, or (better in my opinion) put a swr analyzer on the unbalanced input to the unit and tune for 50 ohms R and zero reactance. The range of impedances the circuit can tune is extended by a relay that switches the capacitor between the Hi Z side of inductors and the Low Z side (the capacitor is in parallel with the inductors i.e. you may think of the Matchmaster as a set of parallel L circuits sharing a common capacitor with a 1:1 balun on the input). To energize the relay and switch the capacitor the Matchmaster must be supplied with 115 v. ac. With my loop, all of the impedances presented to the Matchmaster were high meaning that the relay did not have to be switched—once set it could be left without any voltage on it.
I have my Matchmaster positioned where the open wire feed enters my basement, about 10 feet from the shack. To tune it, I put the analyzer on it, tune, then connect the transmatch to the feed from the transmitter. This is okay for me as I often park on one frequency for an entire evening. DX chasers and anyone else who QSYs often might find this inconvenient and would have to work out an easier arrangement.
In operation of the Matchmaster, two problems surfaced which had to be fixed, the first one due to my own incompetence about 18 months ago: With the loop, I attempted to achieve a 50 ohm Z on 160 m. Unfortnately the best SWR I could come up with was around 5:1 at 1.92 MHz. Of course with the feedline so short, the antenna so small, and low to the ground, it was probably ridiculous to attempt this but I wanted to operate on 160 m. and it was too cold outside to put up a real antenna for the band. I decided to use a second tuner to tune the 5:1 SWR down to a reasonable match to my transmitter, thinking at 1.92 MHz, a 5:1 SWR might be tolerable if I kept the power low. Things were okay running about 200 watts and I was actually making contacts with hams in neighboring states with probably only 20 watts getting radiated, but after a few weeks I got a bit carried away one night, pushed a few too many watts into the setup and the next thing I knew, I had saturated and smoked the little 12 inch bead 1:1 coax balun in the transmatch. On that one I plead guilty, and I made my own more robust balun which has replaced the stock balun. The other problem involved erratic tuning of the roller inductors when the unit was new. Removing the rear cover and looking around revealed that the inside cabinet was somewhat dirty with sawdust and some of the particles were interfering with the proper operation of the roller inductor. Simply blowing out the cabinet fixed the problem.
My Matchmaster unit was carefully packed in a substantial amount of bubble wrap and shipped via UPS in a large rugged box with ample “Fragile” warnings on its exterior. The unit arrived undamaged.
The manual is well written and clear, however the operation of a transmatch of this design is so basic that a manual is almost unnecessary. The Matchmaster manual is useful for its schematic, and supplements which consist of a copy of the aforementioned Rich Measures article, and the OEM manual for whichever SWR bridge you select.
Thanks to Hal Mandel, W4HBM for comments in his seven page review (unpublished) and to John Kaufmann, K9KEU for information contained in a Matchmaster review which appeared in Electric Radio.
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KA1XO
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Rating: 5/5
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Aug 17, 2004 13:04
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Worthwhile Investment
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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Using a 600-ohm, 4-inch wide open wire feedline running into an odd-length (371') dipole, the NYE MB-V-A just wouldn't even go near a null on 160 and the output toroids for the balanced feedline made the cabinet top hot after a few minute RTTY transmission.
Looking around the internet I spotted the Bliss MatchMaster series of tuners and contacted the company. John Bliss, W5EOE personally builds each of the tuners when the order is received. The company has no warehouse full of units ready to ship out and this is why: John asks about the shack and the station arrangement. My shack had a place on the lower op table that was just 12 inches high. The feedline, as said before, is 600 ohm and the 10AWG conductors are just over 4 inches apart. I asked John if he could match up the station specs and he said "of course." In fact, when I asked if he could incorporate a high-power coax switch in the tuner, like the NYE has so the dummy load can be selected for tune-up, he said, "of course." When I asked if a remote control could be fabricated, a week later, allowing the tuner to go on a shelf near the feed through insulators, John fabricated a matching unit that took only a couple of hours to wire in and get going.
The Bliss tuner uses a non-conductive housing made of both 1/4" and 5/16" dense black plastic that has a natural black-wrinkle finish. It's hard to tell, even up close, that it's not a wrinkle finish steel cabinet, and not having a conductive cabinet means less interference with the tuning guts.
The components inside really make the tuner unique. John uses telco-style switchboard spring leaf momentary contact switches for the motor drives. I've seen similar switches in central office locations that were over 50 years old and still going strong! John uses Collins aircraft
style inductors, capacitors and drive trains. They have Collins labels and calibration stickers. The roller inductors are the type that collect a ribbon off a feed drum and wind up inductance. The vacuum relays to make the unit tune an impedance of less than 50 ohms are EIMAC (!) and are rated at 10KW. John uses felt pads under the switch rockers and has bypass capacitors across many circuits.
The construction shows a workmanlike attention to detail.
The tuning operation allows the station to quickly find a null in reflected power at all
operating frequencies. I am fond of 160 meters and the MB-V-A was not. However, the Bliss Matchmaster finds a sweet spot in short order. Loading up first into a 5KW dummy load allows my station to be at the 50 ohm point. Using low power, the tuner finds the sweet spot, and then when the linear amplifier is kicked in, there are no spits and sputters.
These tuners are not for the casual amateur. They are worth the money, and built to the specifications of the buyer. Additional components like coax switches and wattmeters can be included in the construction, and the physical dimensions can be adjusted to the individual shack.
As John told me, there are not a plethora of components remaining to fabricate these units, and when the end of the pile is reached there will be no more units sold.
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W4TH
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Rating: 5/5
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Apr 23, 2004 04:14
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The Very Best Made
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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I have owned my Bliss Match Master Tuner for 3 years now, and I can not find a single thing wrong with the tuner.
I have the "local motorized" version, which means the entire unit is in one desk top cabinet. There are several versions of the tuner available. They are all motor driven, but you control the match point, in other words the tuner is not an "auto tune" just motorized.
There are versions for both balanced line and coax. There are also several options as to choice of watt meters. I have the RF Applications digital meter in my tuner. It works great.
The balanced line version like I have is what is known as a "balanced balanced" tuner. It has two huge motor driven roller inductors, and a single motor driven vacuum variable capacitor. My model also has a large coaxial balun on the INPUT SIDE of the tuner.
You can learn all about the tuners at this web site.
http://airwaterkinginc.purification.com/bzmmremotemotor.html
They are no longer available through Tom's Tubes....I know, because I am Tom.
I was selling the tuners for John Bliss, but I had more orders than he could fill. He decided it would be better if he sold direct to his customers so he could have better control over his inventory.
I have had some very big amps like the Emtron DX-3 and now the Alpha 77SX, but I have NEVER seen the Bliss match Master Tuner arc, spit, or sputter, and I have never seen it fail to find a perfect 1 to 1 match on ANY band or ANY antenna. What more can you ask for?
The prices run from around $1200.00 to $2000.00 depending on model and options, but since you will never have to buy another antenna tuner....EVER....You cant loose. They are simply the BEST.....PERIOD.
73
Tom
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K4HW
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Rating: 5/5
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Nov 17, 2001 11:47
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Very Impressive
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I needed an antenna tuner that I could control remotely and that would handle full limit with no worries. None of the tuners I found came close to meeting these two requirements until I found the MatchMaster. My antenna is a 160-meter horizontal loop with the feed point located about 150 feet from the shack and the antenna out beyond that. The coax is underground to the tuner and 600-ohm open wire feed line from the tuner to the antenna. I can now tune the antenna to 1.0:1 anywhere on 160-10 meters. I echo Bill?s enthusiasm in the previous post and will not duplicate his description of the tuner, which he covers so well. Besides, you can get all the info at http://airwaterkinginc.purification.com/bzmmremotemotor.html. More info on the theory of operation is available at http://www.vcnet.com/measures/.
Since I wanted a little more automation from the tuner I built an automatic tuner control unit with a small PLC and some things lying around the shack. The PLC control simply plugs into the cable from the tuner and replaces the remote control box completely. There is a little LCD display with buttons on the desk that allows me to return the tuner to any of the stored settings in just a few seconds. The PLC also connects to the analog output of the 756PRO and makes the tuner control ready for the band the rig is tuned to. This control would be a good application for a PIC or Basic Stamp but I had most of this stuff lying around and could get it going quickly.
I realy like a well made product that is comprehensive yet addaptable. This one is.
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WA4M
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Rating: 5/5
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Jun 15, 2001 21:04
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Possibly the best high power antenna tuner ever made.
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Time owned: 3 to 6 months
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I have been looking for an antenna tuner that would actually work. One that could take legal power without arcing over, and one that could tune open wire and coax equally well. I have a beam with a narrow swr 2/1 bandwidth, especially on 20 meters, so I need a tuner that will tune coax. I also use a couple of ladder line fed 160 antennas. A 160 meter full wave loop and also a 160 meter inverted vee. I use these wire antennas on all the bands not covered by the beam. But mostly I talk on 160 75 and 40 meters, with 160 being my favorite band. So you see, I need a tuner that can handle a non-resonant antenna while I am running full legal limit. In the last 6 months I have tried the following tuners. 1. Nye Viking MB-VA...Good tuner for the bands it would tune, but it would not even begin to tune either of my ladder line fed 160 meter antennas. 2. Palstar AT4K...Tuned coax fine, but would not tune my 160 full wave loop on 75 meters, or 40 meters. It also arced over quite often. 3. Heathkit 2060A Believe it or not of the other 4 tuners I tried this one was the best of the bunch. It tuned all the antennas just fine, but it did to arc over on some bands, but to be fair it was not all that often, but it was just a little too often for me. 4. MFJ.... Arced over at 500 watts....need I say more? I had decided to keep the Heathkit tuner, and just keep my power down to about 1200 watts and be done with my antenna tuner search, but I was needing a set of tubes and I was searching the internet when I came across a web site that sold the tubes I needed. The web site also said they sold the "best antenna tuner ever made bar none"!!! Well I said to myself, I doubt that, but I was curious so I decided to click on the link to the antenna tuner page. What I found was a tuner called the Bliss Match Master antenna tuner. It seems the design for this tuner was based on an article written by Richard Measures which was in QST several years back...Sorry I cant remember which issue but if you do a search under Richard Measures, it will show up. The design of this tuner is what is called a "Balanced Balanced" tuner. I had a homebrew version of this tuner once before and it worked great at low power levels. The tuner is different from most in that it has two roller inductors instead of just one, and it has just one variable capacitor instead of two like most other tuners. The rollers are linked together so they both tune the at the same rate, and one tunes one leg of the balanced feed line and the other tunes the other leg.I read about the tuner and found out there are four different designs of the tuner. There is the low power (300/400 watts) model, the high power (at least 2kw++) manual model, the high power local motorized, and the high power remote motorized. The manual models both offer meters for inductance, capacitance, and power/swr, that is at least I think they do if I remember correctly, but don't hold me to that. I do know what kind of metering the high power motorized models have in them, but you can find out more about them on the web site listed at the end of this article First I need to explain the difference between the two motorized models. The locaL motorized has everything in one fairly large cabinet. The remote motorized has the meters/controls in one small desk top cabinet, and the actual tuner components in a separate cabinet which can be placed under your desk, or even outside according to the info on the web site. It comes standard with a 20ft control cable, but other lengths can be obtained. I bought the local motorized model. I know more about the local model so I will be talking about this model from here on. The tuner comes standard with a Daiwa CN-101 watt/swr meter. This is a good meter, but it only goes to 1500 watts. Sometimes during tuning my amp goes over that power level, and I just wanted a little head room for my meter, I don't think it is good for any equipment to be operated at it's maximum all the time, so since I normally operate 160 meters, and you HAVE to run at legal limit in the summer time if you want to be heard across the street, I just didn't want a meter that was going to stay against the peg all the time, so I asked if I could get a different meter. That was perfectly ok with the Match Master folks, so they deducted the cost of the CN-101 Daiwa meter, and I sent them a 3kw meter in its place. The meter I sent was a different size, but the builder just built my tuner around my meter. I understand they now offer as an option a great digital meter in place of the analog Daiwa CN-101 meter. The digital meter is really a quality piece of equipment from what I have read about it, but I am perfectly happy with my 3kw analog meter in my tuner.The Bliss Match Master tuner is designed for all types of feed lines, coax, open wire, and ladder line will all work with the Bliss Match Master. There is a switch on the tuner so you can select the type feed line you are using. In one position it is set for coax, and the other position is set for open wire/ladder line type feed lines. When I unboxed my tuner the first thing I noticed was the quality of the craftmanship....and the weight, this sucker is heavy! I think in this case you can equate weight with quality. The cabinet is a really nice blue/grey color. It really looks neat! The watt/swr meter is at the top left of the unit with the switches for operation being directly below the meter. There are two switches, one operates the the very very large synchronized ribbon wound roller inductors. The other switch operates the vacuum variable capacitor. The switches are momentary and you have to hold them engaged as long as you want the rollers or the capacitor to move. The switches add more capacitance/inductance when engaged in the up position, and naturally right the reverse in the down position.There are two plexi glass windows in the tuner so you can actually see the rollers turn and the vacuum variable moving. There are scales on the plexiglass windows so you can tell how much or how little inductance you are actually using. You can guage this by how far the ribbon has advanced down the rollers and look at the reading on the window that corresponds with the location of the ribbon. The vacuum capacitor has a pointer that will indicate the capacitance of the tuner by another scale on the capacitor window. Now back to the switches. Just below and above the switches that control the roller inductor and the capacitor are lights that come on when the limits of the travel for the capactior and the roller inductors have been reached in either direction. I have had both the roller and the capacitor against the stop numerous times and as far as I can tell there is no harm in running either of them to a full stop against the peg as it were. I think the lights are just a way of letting you know the limit is coming up. To find a match on the tuner is so very simple....it is actually FUN! All you have to do the first time you use the tuner is to place both the roller inductors and the vacuum variable at about half of their scale on the indicators. Then you watch your swr meter on the tuner as you engage first one switch and then the other. I have found it does not seem to matter much which switch you start with, the vacuum variable or the roller inductors. Just move them in and out and watch the swr rise and fall. Then when you start getting close to a match, just slowy bump the switches until you hit your goal...a one to one match. It really is fun, and after you get the hang of it you will be able to return to the same settings for the same frequency in no time. I made a chart and wrote down the settings on both the rollers and the capacitor for the frequencies I normally talk on most of the time. I can look at the chart now and within 10 seconds have a flat one to one match! The actual "real world" operation of the Bliss Match Master has been nothing but a joy. I have tuned the coax fed beam and the 450 ohm ladder line fed 160 full wave loop and the ladder line fed 160 inverted vee. I tuned the wire antennas, the loop and the inverted vee, both with 1500 watts of power on each and every HF band.....PLUS I even tuned the 160 loop on six meters! I didnt have any extra power other than the 100 watts my Icom 756 puts out on six meters though. I never once had an arc, a spark, a snap, or a pop. It was pure silence and a pure joy to know you could actually run 1500 watts into a tuner and not have to worry about it spitting at you. I want to make one thing clear. I have told several of my friends about this tuner and when they come to take a look at it they usually say "let me see your automatic antenna tuner". I guess they associate the motors in the tuner with automatic operation, but the tuner WILL NOT AUTOMATICALLY FIND A MATCH FOR YOU! You will have to do that yourself by controlling the operation of the switches which in turn control the motors that move the inductors and the capacitor to find the match. I just dont want anyone to get the idea this thing will automacically find a match for you. IT WONT!!! What the Bliss Match Master will do is give you a completely flat match in just a few seconds after you get the hang of using the controls. It will be a good looking addition to any shack. It will not arc, spark, spit, sputter, or fart at you even when you are running legal limit into a grossly mismatched antenna. I cant really say this becuase I dont know for sure, but if quality of construction and the quality and specs of the parts used in the construction of this tuner are any indication then I would not be surprised if the Bliss Match Master would handle a lot more than legal limit power wise. I can say that sometimes when I am tuning my pair of 4-1000 jugs I may accidentally go over legal limit by a kw or so....just for a second or two...until I can get the thing tuned correctly, and again I can honestly say I have NEVER seen the first arc, spit or sputter. I have never seen an antenna I could not match either. The best antenna tuner ever made??? As far as I am concerned it is....I have tried most of the so called "L
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