"Steve Nosko" wrote in message
...
Nice tutorial, Reg I printed it out for ref.

...however.
The 2M rigs I've measured (3) are WAY off. The +20 +40 and +6o are
usually
also around 6dB plus or minus 3 or 4 dB. I measured my TS-830s and it was
not very close, and my 706, but don't recall the results and haven't done
the TS 2000 yet.

73, Steve K9DCI

"Reg Edwards" wrote in message
...
At HF it's all very simple.

To summarise -

The S-meter is essentially a 50-ohm power or wattmeter.

It is correctly calibrated with a 50-ohm signal generator with its
open-circuit volts set to 100 microvolts. The S-meter should then read
S9.


While I will not debate or dispute the origional S-meter meanings, I would
have to say there is almost no rig that follows that calibration. I have
measured a few low band rigs and several vhf/uhf rigs. The low band units
seem to be somewhat more 'calibrated' than the VHF and above rigs but most
are usually way off. From my observations and the write ups in QST the
S-meter and the 50 uV and all the 6 db per S-unit should not even be spoken
of .

We need to kill the idea of the s-unit being 6 db or anything at all. They
are just numbers on an uncalibrated meter on most receivers. You might just
as well mark the meter from 0 to 100 and go by whatever number the meter is
showing. The meters are not linear, log, or any combination that can be
depended on from one brand to another brand. Even changing bands on the
same receiver will usually change the 'calibration' of the s-meter.