Tuesday, April 2, 2024
This wasn’t a real surprise, but today I dove into the MFJ-986 Differential T antenna tuner I purchased in late January.
The seller said the unit had “gotten wet” but still worked. The button to light the meter backlight was broken. No big deal, says I. The tuner was complete, and better yet, had an actual old-style roller inductor in it, not this Rube Goldberg “Aircore” inductor crap that MFJ uses now. (Editorial Comment: I rag on the Aircore technology, but I’ve found it reliable and serviceable. Being old fashioned, I just like the old roller inductors.)
The box arrived weeks ago and remained unopened; I didn’t need it immediately, so I never opened it. My mistake.
The tuner was VERY poorly packed, and the unit bounced around in the box during shipment. As a result, the jostling beat the living SHIT out of the meter. Not only was it knocked loose, the meter was busted into three parts.
The only thing attached by the wiring was the actual meter movements. The lens of the meter and the actual scale were both beat up and knocked out of the meter. The meter needles were twisted into pretzels. UGH.
The roller inductor needs a belt to connect it to the turns counter. No biggie. But the differential capacitor … the input shaft on the capacitor was bent; when you turned the adjument knob, it actually made the whole capacitor move up and down in its mounting fixture. Not sure this is a big problem, but it just looks bad, you know? I bought the innards of an MFJ-986 last year, and I think I’ll check the box to see if it includes the tuning capacitor without a bent input shaft.
Actually, I plan to put the tuner inline and check it out next chance I get (after I put the turns counter belt back on it). I can live without the meter, its just the gaping hole in the front panel looks unsightly (to say the least, if not less).
That’s all for this trip.
73 es CUL ….. de KY4Z …. SK …. SK ….. (dit dit)