Buck wrote:

A friend of mine suggests I setup a field strength meter and tune for
maximum fs. I don't usually use baluns so I would wonder how accurate
that would be.
. . .

That's a perfectly good way to adjust a tuner, providing the meter is
far enough away from your transmitter that direct leakage radiation from
the transmitter and line between it and the tuner aren't making a
significant difference. As long as it is, it doesn't matter if you have
a balun or not, or whether your feedline is radiating or not. Adjusting
the tuner has no effect on how your system radiates, just how much. The
field strength meter is sampling just one part of the overall pattern.
But adjusting the tuner increases or decreases all parts of the pattern
in proportion, so the field strength meter tells you what you want to know.

A field strength meter isn't, however, usually a good way of judging
whether a change in the antenna (as opposed to a tuner adjustment) is
good or bad. This is because changing the antenna does affect the
pattern, and the field strength meter only tells you what's happening in
one direction -- and likely in the near field, to boot.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL