The ATU-100 Seems to work....

I get an email from the seller last night asking me to try tuning again, reminding me to use FM. pointing out that the model has no memory function so moving means returning, make sure there is adequate power, and to watch the video they sent me to again..

 

The video I would never have found without them telling me where it was..

 

So at 11pm last night, I sat down and retuned. At it behaved. I left it on all night thinking maybe it'd get silly again, so at 4.45am I did it again...

Apologies for the noise.. the radio is hooked up to a battery.. and the charger is still on, so it's a bit noisy (and there's a reef tank just outside the door)... 

 

So right now I guess the answer is that it works. If you pay close attention, you'll notice it didn't actually find a decent SWR on 40m. I never noticed it while videoing, but I noticed during playback. Trying it again, I noticed the same thing, then after that it seemed to work fine. It is trying to tune the vertical which is a fair chunk of antenna. 

Tuning at 10m was a bit interesting as well - it peaked at about 34w, when every other band tuned was at 10w. When I went back to it, the power had dropped slightly. Going from 29MHz to 28Mhz, the power output changed again. I also noticed that my PC speakers picked up a stack of noise, and my PC decided to show me the contents of a USB stick (the antenna cable is laying over the hub it's on). 

I turned the tuner off and back on, and it briefly made some difference to this behaviour but the noise came back (and isn't there while it's off). Interestingly, it seems to have remembered the tuning. At 29MHz, I'm seeing about 9.7w. At 28 MHz I'm seeing anywhere from 17-30w with a SWR still reading about 1.17. 

I re-tuned at 28MHz, and the power dropped down to the expected <10w. Going up to 29MHz, the power was expected, but the SWR was out, so clearly the tuning is different enough that I need to re-tune up there. I've noticed this time dropping back to 28MHz, that the tune is out again, but I'm no longer getting all the interference through my speakers. Possibly it's just tuned itself better? I highly doubt that the radio was pushing over 30w at any point through the tuner. The maths doesn't make a lot of sense given what I've got the power set to. Between 10 and 20 watts somewhere I'd believe.

I'm going to look into the tuner mod for the Icom so I can get the Tuner button working and producing a carrier over CW so I can avoid this stupid manually setting to FM garbage. The only thing I haven't decided is if I want to just dodge something up myself, or if I want to just buy something pre-made by someone with a clue, and not risk my own radio.