MAT-TUNER mAT-180H

The MAT-TUNER mAT-180H tuner arrived yesterday and I eagerly hooked it up to the ICOM IC-706Mk2G, replacing the ATU-100. 

Install was a breeze. 

The first time I tuned, it appeared at a 1.5 match very quickly, except as soon as I'd TX, the SWR was off the meter. 

I had to take off for a meeting at that point, so I found myself yet again for purchasing stuff from China off eBay. 

Fast forward 3 hours and I returned. 

Some quick troubleshooting lead me to the cable going between the SWR/Power meter and the ATU. As soon as I swapped that out, it behaved entirely as expected. Success. 

I jumped into a couple of bands and gave it a tune real quick. It works. 

Quickly. 

For the purists who noticed the quick TX burst at the end, as soon as I put the camera down, I sent out an SSTV testing message. 

So far, every time I've needed it to tune, it's come in at a damned near 1:1 match - which I expect given that the dipole is actually pretty close anyway. Based off limited time to test, so far it seems to be quite a bit more consistent than the matching the ATU-100 does - but then the ATU-100 does give you specific fine detail about the match that the mAT-180H doesn't.

It would though be cool if the mAT-180H had a screen and the level of detail that the ATU-100 provides. Complete overkill when you consider that most ATUs don't have that anyway, but still.. I like displays. 

Overall, I'm fairly happy with it so far. Not having to worry about charging a battery with yet another noisy USB cable (and the whole not worrying about the battery dying) makes this fairly appealing.

There being one less tune button to push is good too. At the moment I'm setup so I have to have the "tuner" option on the radio on to tune, so if I jump bands I need to flick it. I've considered having it trigger off PTT, but given I do a lot of SSTV, I'm not sure if that adversely effects anything. It would add some simplicity to the whole process.