Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Several years ago I participated in a local contest. Over a 24 hour period I activated my mobile station in about 30 different locations. On my car, my vertical antenna screwed into a boot-lip mount connected to an antenna tuner or ATU, and my radio. I used rope to guy the antenna, threaded through the rear windows and held tight by closing the car boot. Setting up consisted of parking the car, triggering the ATU to tune the antenna system and calling CQ. Moving to the next location consisted of driving there and setting up again. Although this worked really well, I'm skipping over what I'm interested in exploring today. The phrase "triggering the ATU to tune the antenna system" hides a lot of complexity. It was a surprise to me that there were several locations where the ATU just wouldn't tune. Despite my best efforts I was unable to get the system to a point where the radio was happy. In some cases I tuned off frequency and put up with a poor SWR. In others I physically had