Automating a manual antenna tuner

MFJ Versatuner with servo’s, a stepper and a Raspberry Pi

Automatic antenna tuners are expensive, manual antenna tuners are slow. So it has been a long time I dreamed of making my own automatic system.

As this year I was following a raspberry pi class and we needed to make our own project I decided to finally try to make this automatic tuner.

Summary:
– Forward and reflected power are measured with a Boxa Swr bidirectional coupler combined with an ADC
– SWR is calculated in the raspberry pi and displayed on an LCD
– When SWR is to high an alarm is sounded in CW
– after pushing a button the capacitors and the coil in the tuner are reset to 0. For the capacitors I use 2 servos, for the coil I use a stepper motor. All mechanical connections are made using 3d-printed parts. The reference point for the stepper motor is made using an infrared port.
– next is the tuning operation:
— the ‘transmitter’ capacitor is sweeped over it’s full range and swr is measured every degree. Then this capacitor is returned to it’s best position
— next idem for the ‘antenna’ capacitor
— sweeping operation is repeated for maximum 4 times, if the SWR is below 1,5:1 then tuning is stopped. If SWR is above this limit then the coil is moved to the next setting and the sweeping is repeated
– built in securities:
— all alarms on the LCD and in morse code
— alarm when SWR is to high
— alarm when tx-power is to high for tuning
— coil/stepper can not be switched when there is rf-power

Remarks:
– no tuners have been harmed in any way for this operation!
– Was the raspberry pi the best choice for this? This could probably have been done using some microcontroller instead but the class I followed wat not arduino or esp 32 🙂

A 30w dummy load really can’t handle 100w

Or at least that’s what I found out a few days ago… I was doing some tests on a bidirectional coupler (more about that project in a future post) and I didn’t pay enough attention so I cranked up the power of my transmitter to 100w. And, of course, after a few seconds I got the smell of burned electronics in my shack.
That’s when I decided to go through my junkboxes and find the resistor I once bought to build myself a decent dummyload.
These are the results:

The resistor is an RFP 250-50 TC so this should handle up to about 250w.
SWR between 160m and 6m is max 1.04:1. I have not tested any higher frequencies because my antenna analyser only goes up to 54 MHz.
The heatsink is salvaged from an old telephone switchboard (made by Bell Telephone in 1980).