ATU-100 Arrived.. and isn't healthy

Well, the ATU-100 external automatic tuner arrived.

Initially it didn't work.. The power meter was all over the shop for a start. It kind of seemed to report things I expected when it was tuned. The power was up in double digits.. enough to tell me I needed to wind back to my allowed 10w, and the SWR was a little high at 40m, which made sense.

When I tried tuning, it would sit on SWR=Tune.

Then when I tried recording it, it seemed to work. Once.

 

Then after I reset it, it wouldn't tune again, on any band. 

Sometimes it would show reasonably high power, but wouldn't tune. Then while it was reset and not tuned, it would start to show low power and SWR of zero. This was despite having enough power running through it that another of my G90 was picking up the signal without even having an antenna connected. It was clearly pushing out more than the required 5w to get it to tune. 

Currently after a reset, I have the power set to 2 - that should be over 20 watts. According to the ATU-100, it's about .4w. I'm not exactly being quiet, and I have the mic gain set to 5, which is recommended as the sweet spot for this mic on this radio. I doubt it's .4 watts.

A little while later, it seemed to be good for a couple of minutes. I connected it to the G90, and the power readings were close. And it tuned. Twice. 

I even swapped the radios back over, and had a decent match. Then I hit the reset button.. and could no longer tune any more. The powers are back all over the place, and TUNE stays on.

A while after that, just to triple check that it was also definitely not working on the G90, I was able to get it to tune 15m.. once. Nothing else. Moving back to the IC706 resulted in the first pass matching on nothing. A second pass and I was able to tune 15m. Yet again, that was once. When it matched, it matched well. 

Pretty safe to say that I think I've received a dud. I've sent a message to the seller to see if they will agree to a replacement. Happy to give another one a go. If that fails, well then, it might be time to try something else. 

Hopefully the flagpoles and 80m dipole get here soon, so I can use a relatively resonant antenna while I wait.