Bruce W. Ellis wrote:
The various automatic antenna tuner/matcher manufacturers list a
tuning range in Ohms - e.g., 6 - 1000 Ohms. The question I have is to
whether that value is the magnitude of the impedance (which correlates
to SWR) or the real part of the impedance (since the tuner should be
able to cancel out the reactive part of the impedance). W0BF

neither, really. What it probably means is that, theoretically it can
transform a resistive load of 6-1000 ohms to 50 ohms.

You actually have to look at the available L and C and decide if it can
tune a particular reactive load at a particular frequency. The step size
for L and C will also determine how good the final match is.

You can write a little program (or spend some serious time with a smith
chart) to iterate through the various possibilities, essentially working
backwards from a 50 ohm load impedance to see the possible input Zs it
can match.