So the first version of the tuner was a dismal failure. Somehow i ended up with 300pF of stray capacitance floating around and, well, as you know, that is only ever going to screw things up. Now I am not sure that I have fixed that problem, But i have pulled back the copper pour on top and bottom around the RF path and that should reduce the stray capacitance, i have also used different relays and modified the design slightly. All things which should help.
The other main thing i have done is moved to the ESP32 rather than an arduino. The plan here is to be able to remote control the tuner over wifi thus allowing it to be placed at the feed point to the antenna. SWR and auto tuning will come later. First thing is to get this part actually working as a tuner.
Interesting, I’ve been thinking of something similar with a remote antenna switch using wireless fob not WiFi.
Haven’t started it but I think it would work… I would be interested in the tuner as I’m using 68m skyloop at 7m above gnd & using hb openline into 9:1 balun & 1:1 then manual tuner, it tunes 80m thru 6m no issue at all.
Cheers, Adam VK2YK/VK5GA
A remote antenna switch using one of those 433mhz rf tx/rx modules would also work. At home, I just run everything on the local network over wifi. The other benefit of doing this Adam is I can remote control things from anywhere I have internet access. The ultimate plan is to be able to fully remote control into a homebrew station from my phone, or to have what is essentially a wifi head for the radio with all the controls on it, but have the TX/RX in another location networked together over the internet. Think remote head on steroids LOL. These are the lofty and long term plans Adam. I do not know if i have the skills yet to pull it all off, but we all need to think big LOL
If this works, you could modify my board slightly to add in the antenna switching and put the 9:1 on the same board. Mount the whole thing at the feedpoint of the antenna and control it from inside. And I plan to make it auto tuning as well, so other than a couple of buttons to bypass and retune, it would just be pushing back display data. That is the bigger picture Adam HAHAHA