Dave wrote:
ugh! all of this was over a slipped decimal point??? so we are down to .2"
transition, which pretty much agrees with the one i came up with, and which
basically means that by the time you are out of the connector shell you are
back at Z0. and since the meter takes its own 50 ohm 'environment' with it
for sampling it is reading every thing exactly as it should... and exactly
as has been measured... and there is no requirement for some particular
length of 50 ohm coax on either side of a meter... what a waste of a
perfectly good argument, you better apologize big time for this one cecil!

I do apologize for the slip of the decimal point and for not finding it
before today but I think you guys completely missed the context of the
original argument and instead went off on several interesting tangents.

Now back to the original context: As Reg pointed out, you can't have an
SWR on a feedline that doesn't exist so how much 50 ohm feedline must
exist *external to the SWR meter* to be able to report a valid 50 ohm SWR
reading *on that coax*? Turns out to be around an inch, more or less, and
that is a good thing to know. Thanks for answering the question even if
in a time consuming way. If you had simply said that 0.2" of 50 ohm
coax is required to establish a 50 ohm environment *external to the SWR
meter*, we could have started arguing from that point and it would have
saved a lot of time and effort.
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp