Our friend Alan (W2AEW) just published this excellent short video demonstrating how to quickly tune the Penntek TR-45L’s Z-Match ATU. Of course, this same technique can be applied to the Emtech ZM-2 or any other manual Z-Match tuner:
An excellent tutorial, Alan! Thank you!
Thanks for publishing this, Thomas. A friend had pointed me to one of your early TR-45L videos and I watched you tune yours up and thought – yep, I need to put a video together to show this Z-match trick that I had been using for years on my ZM-2.
I’m honored to be the catalyst for this video, Alan! Ha ha! 🙂
-Thomas
Excellent video, Alan. I love my TR-45L and your advice will make using it even more enjoyable.
Thanks to Thomas as well for giving you the opportunity to share this excellent information.
Dave
All users of Z matches find them to be better than transmatches simply because there’s no roller coaster that requires you to have three hands! Iterative tuning can be done in 2 seconds when you know how. Interestingly, in the UK, the KW E-Zee Match (the best tuner ever made!) dominated the market in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Also, when tuning any circuit, this approach works best. I’ve seen an “untunable” uwave [microstrip] amplifier tuned in a minute by an “amateur” – whereas the operator who worked all day on this stuff just couldn’t make it go. To prove the point, he shuffled the pucks and asked me to tune it, which I did to the amazement of the now gathered engineers in the cleanroom.
Love the story of the amateur showing the professionals how it’s done!