How to Load a Ham Radio Antenna

Video Transcript

"Hi for Expert Village I'm Kurt Glaser N7QJM. In this short segment we're going to be talking about how to actually finalize the tuning of your antenna just before you go on the air. So let's start that right now. Antenna terminates back into this area right here into the back of our tuner. And we're going to actually load the antenna to make sure it's tuned. That little square device right in the middle of the screen is called a balance. It balances an unbalanced line and it prevents noise. This meter here is what we're going to be watching; we are adjusting this particular device to the dummy load. So we've going to turn this over to the dummy load, the next piece here is we're going to adjust the settings on the actual transceiver so we're going to kick it over to full so we've turned it over here. What we're doing is we're going to be testing, and the final test is to actually set it in a mode where we can actually watt. Now I'm going to zoom in on this one here as we hit the power watt, and watch what happens to this meter here. This goes up and it should read around about 100 watts, which it is doing. That's what we're doing in terms of tuning. To make sure that we've got everything connected properly and we don't blow up anything on the rig itself. So, that sets really well, and we are ready to now proceed at tuning the antenna to the frequencies that we operate on."