Antenna Tuning help

[ian3211]

I have an antenna tuning question. I'm tuning my antenna for my radio, on channels 1-8 the meter is reading 1.02. On channel 15 its reading at 1.52. The repeater channel swr is reading at 2.02. Whats the best way for me to tune my antenna?

[OffRoaderX]

Dont mess with it - 2.02:1 is plenty good enough.

[OffRoaderX]

It sounds like its tuned just fine, and I wouldn't mess with it .. But how you actually tune it depends on what kind of antenna it is.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, ian3211 said:

I have an antenna tuning question. I'm tuning my antenna for my radio, on channels 1-8 the meter is reading 1.02. On channel 15 its reading at 1.52. The repeater channel swr is reading at 2.02. Whats the best way for me to tune my antenna?

A little bit of the philosophy of "tuning"...

The goal is to optimize antenna performance and by doing so increase transmit and receive performance.

Theoretically, an antenna plays best on a specific frequency and covers the neighboring frequencies with decreasing performance.

With that said, the tuning depends on the use of the antenna (who would have guessed?!? )...

In plain words, if you are working in a specific frequency range and you use all of the range's frequencies, you are best off by tuning to the center of the range as that means your "losses" are somewhat evenly distributed.

However, if you have a preference for a specific frequency (your go to channel or repeater), there might be an argument to optimize for that use case. - In the extreme, however, that might mean that one "loses" performance at other frequencies / channels. In a case where the radio is basically only used for one channel, that might be acceptable... 

Little side note: Tuning is more important on transmit than on receive as most radios could hear decently even if one would replace the antenna with a wire coat hanger (as many 70's and 80' car showed us).

In any case, there is no "one size fits all perfection" and as our YouTube friend stressed: Your setup is "plenty good enough" !!!

 

 

[WRYZ926]

5 hours ago, ian3211 said:

I have an antenna tuning question. I'm tuning my antenna for my radio, on channels 1-8 the meter is reading 1.02. On channel 15 its reading at 1.52. The repeater channel swr is reading at 2.02. Whats the best way for me to tune my antenna?

You will be fine with that. My Comet CA-712EFC which is a dedicated GMRS antenna gets 1.2 on channels 1-7, 1.1 on channels 8-14 and 1.6 on channels 15-22. My Comet 2X4SR (dual band) gets 1.5, 1.2, and 1.8.

A SWR of 2 or lower is fine. I wouldn't sweat about the 2.02 SWR reading.

[ian3211]

24 minutes ago, OffRoaderX said:

It sounds like its tuned just fine, and I wouldn't mess with it .. But how you actually tune it depends on what kind of antenna it is.

It's a Nagoya NMO-200c 38.5" antenna on a Nagoya RB-50 NMO mount.

[ian3211]

1 minute ago, OffRoaderX said:

Dont mess with it - 2.02:1 is plenty good enough.

ok cool thanks dude love your videos by the way. Hope to make contact with you one day over the air waves.

 

[ian3211]

Thank you everyone. Still a newbie to the GMRS world and still figuring it out.