A Tale of Two Tuners

Recall last month's posts about getting a new antenna up and in praise of a basic but full-featured manual tuner?  I have a small addendum in that department.

In this above-described setup, I was initially using my transceiver's internal tuner on the higher (well, 40m and up) bands with the external tuner set to bypass mode, then switching the internal tuner off and using the external tuner for 80 & 60m.  I could tell though, things were struggling, especially on 30m.  Transmit on 30m somehow seemed to be dead.  The crossed-needle display on the external tuner was reading about two times the input power, which was somewhat strange (and should have immediately raised a red flag...), and I just wasn't making any contact there.

In search for some answers, I put the handheld SWR meter on the transceiver input to the antenna/external tuner system, and found that the resistance and reactance were both were very high on 30m.  On 20m and up, no problems, but this antenna is designed to function there anyway.  40m seemed OK, though kind of shaky.  Again 60 & 80m where whacky, but I was using the external tuner to strong-arm them into functioning on those bands, so nothing unexpected there.

With this clue in hand, I plopped back down on 30m, switched off the transceiver's internal tuner, tuned up manually, and bam, had two contacts within a half hour on 30.  40m seems better-behaved as well.  My guess is that, by forcing this little antenna that could to tune bands that, by all rights and antenna theory, it should never work on and using the transceiver's internal tuner in series with a bypassed tuner (lots of bare wires inside of that), it was puking RF back into the external tuner which promptly shunted the power out through ground.  I mean, when you try to put shove wavelengths in the 30 to 80 meter range out through an antenna that's only 6.4 meters long, stuff like this is just going to happen.  Good thing I built in a decent grounding system (rtfm) and a feedline choke  from the start, otherwise all kinds of bad things could've popped out.