I need help in designing an Automatic Tuning Unit (ATU) for HF (3-30 MHz)
An inductor that can be rotated by an servo motor to add or remove more windings and in doing so change the inductance
Probably switching just different values of 8 inductors would not be enough to cover entire range, without gaps.
You might need to switch some tuning capacitors also.
Take a look to the schematics of SGC products, which for many years they design HF automatic antenna tuners:
http://www.sgcworld.com/PubInfoPage.html
As a first step, you would want to review expectable complex antenna input impedances from literature or measure them with a VNA, then calculate the optimal matching network for different frequencies.
You'll notice, that the radiation resistance at 3 MHz is extremely low and possibly can't be managed with a simple LC Pi-filter.
You should also check out the Racal ATUs (awesome UK designs), some screenshots are towards the end of this page:
http://members.chello.nl/~t.bloem/ham/HF/hf.html
thank you very much for your attention and your suggestion, but can u give me a specific reference for use a servo motor to add or remove more windings because i'm a beginner fot that application
thank you
---------- Post added at 11:09 ---------- Previous post was at 10:54 ----------
thank you very much for your attention and your suggestion, i'm use a whip antenna with length 1.5 Meter, so it's mean that whip antenna for all frequency HF for 3-30 MHz is still short, and always need an inductors not capacitors, may be i need a specific reference from
you to prove that i have to use a capacitor.....and i have look http://www.sgcworld.com/PubInfoPage.html, but over there written minimum antenna length is 8 feet or 2.6 Meter is not same with me because i'm use a whip antenna with length 4.5 feet or 1.5 Meter, please
give me a specific reference, for my final project, I would greatly appreciate any of your assistance. Thank you very much in advance
thank you
---------- Post added at 11:40 ---------- Previous post was at 11:09 ----------
thank you very much for your attention and your suggestion, i have read and looked that website but i don't know about antenna length of racal radio use, and i don't know about the result for each HF frequency, may be u can show me and give me an another specific reference, please help me to finish my final project .
thank you
That URL is for an ATU for HF frequencies, so you can get an idea of it from the screenshots (e.g types of relay required, approx size of coils, etc),
but unfortunately I have no info on it.
However, for a different Racal ATU, I found this doc via google, which has a very good description:
http://www.vmarsmanuals.co.uk/newsle...es/vra549c.pdf
Some tips: make sure that the RF doesn't get into the microcontroller! and make sure the coils don't
get damaged when hot when operating, another nice thing is to make it
automatically tune on a 'double-press', i.e. if it sees two quick pulses of RF, then it knows that the user has
pressed the transmit button twice quickly to signal an intention to tune, so it invokes the auto-tune function.
It means no button is needed to invoke the auto-tune.
