I'm worried about the real part, its just that after the reactive part
is nice, I don't think matching the real part will be hard.

I've just been reading on the internet and stuff about gamma matches
and at least one of them has said that gamma matches only match the
reactive part. from what you say I guess this is not true?

Hopefully I can get up to school later and read some real material,
but for right now the internet is all i have.

We weren't given a concrete design. More like make a helical antenna
with 12db forward gain at 450 MHz--that's it.

I'm about 99% sure that we set up the analyzer correctly. We tested
some dummy loads (like opens, shorts, etc) on end of the feedline and
they showed up as expected on the smith chart.

Finally, I kid you not. Nothing about impedance matching in this
class. I know a little about L networks and the like, but I don't
know how to implement these networks at high frequenices.