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Reviews For: SOTABeams Mountain Tuner

Category: Antenna Tuners/Matching Networks

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Review Summary For : SOTABeams Mountain Tuner
Reviews: 1MSRP: 33.97
Description:
The Mountain Tuner is our neat little half-wave end-fed antenna tuner. Like all
our products, it's designed to to be effective and robust. Weighing in at just 80g
(less than 3 oz.) including its connecting lead, it's light but it's no lightweight.

Add an inexpensive half-wave end-fed antenna and you're good to go!

Features:

40-30-20-17-15m
Connecting lead built-in: reduces weight and reduces items to forget
Sealed construction - no worries in the rain
Mounting holes to enable the tuner to be pegged down or to allow it to be used
in an elevated feed system
4mm sockets for the antenna and counterpoise
Calibrated tune knob so that you can record the perfect settings easily for your
own antennas
4mm plugs included
6 Watt rating
Complete ready made unit - not a kit.
Important note. The Mountain Tuner requires an antenna to work. It will not tune
an actual mountain...
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.sotabeams.co.uk/mountain-tuner-40-15m/
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0015
M0JMO Rating: 2014-02-03
Great QRP EFHW Tuner! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
After owning a number of mono-band End Fed Half Wave (EFHW) antennas and being pleased with their performance, but frustrated that I had to cart around more than one antenna and matching box to access more than one band, I was excited when I saw that the guys at SOTABeams had launched this new tuner, so ordered one immediately!

Their new "Mountain Tuner" is a specific EFHW tuner that deals with the high impedance presented at the business end of a half-wavelength piece of wire. It tunes EFHW wires for the 40m to 15m bands using a single knob and is really straightforward to tune down to a perfect or almost perfect match.

I made myself a linked multi-band EFHW antenna to go with this tuner, using wire, perspex insulators and small crocodile clips. It covers the 40m/20m/17m/15m bands (I missed out 30m as I'm a no-code heathen!) It is 66ft (20m) long and works great with a 10m fishing pole in an inverted V configuration, or even just hung out of an upstairs window and tied off to a fence in the garden! Bands are changed by clipping/unclipping the relevant pair of crocodile clips to effectively lengthen/reduce the length of the antenna, then turning the knob of the tuner for maximum received noise.

I was sceptical that this simple and inexpensive tuner and antenna would allow my 5w of SSB (KX3) to be heard, but in the past couple of days, I've worked Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Russia, UK, France, Italy and Latvia on multiple bands from my QTH in the middle of the UK with pleasing reports!

The only limitation is that it can only take a maximum of 6W, which wile adhering to the spirit of QRP, falls a bit short of what the KX3 can muster on external power. FT-817 owners won't worry about this though.

I've been really impressed with everything I've bought from this company and this product is one of the best!