Dear all,
I am just back from a vacation to 3B8, Mauritius and want to share my
experience with the FC-40:
I had a small bungaloo with space for an antenna and checked this in
advance with the hotel.
In the back there was an unused metal frame made of scaffolding tubes,
about 10 by 15m in size, 3m high. I had a 12m tall fiberglass fishing
rod like tower (SPIDERBEAM), which I fixed to one of the tubes. A wire
ran from the top of the rod down to 1m above the ground, where the
FC-40 was mounted. The metal frame gave a good earth counterpoise,
however I laid out some 4 radials, between 20m and 5m long. Also found
a metal waterpipe nearby which I also connected to one of the ground
wires.
Tuning the FC-40 was really a charm and done by pressing the TUNE
button for 1 sec. I just had to do this once for the operating
frequencies. Even in receive, the tuner follows the VFO. For tuning,
the output power is automatically reduced to QRP, so you do not cause
too much QRM and high voltages and currents in the tuner are avoided.
The FC-40 did not find a match on 160m and 30m. I think the reasons
were too low resistance for 160m, wire too short and too high for 30m,
wire lenght close to lambda/2. On all other bands, the SWR at the TRX
was nearly 1:1.
I worked mostly 40m cw in the evenings and had great pile ups from
Europe and JA, also VK and US. A sked with DL worked in SSB on 20m and
15m, reported true 59. Overall, I had 676 QSOs.
The combination FC-40/FT-897 (FP-30 built in) and a fberglass pole is
my favorite for travel. No need of finding supports for dipoles and
you can QSY on the fly.
I used a SGC-237 Smarttuner before and was not very lucky with it. It
was hard to find a working wire length and the 237 intended to re-tune
in the middle of a transmission, even if the SWR was fine. This is
particularly not good if you transmit at 100W, it can destroy the
tuner. This can be avoided with an external "SmartLock" circuit, but I
think it should not be necessary. Also, the Smarttuner does not follow
in RX mode, you have to transmit in order to tune and you better
reduce the power while tuning!
I hope this is informative,
vy73, Jurgen, DJ5HD
