KØHB wrote:





Antenna tuners (more properly called feed line tuners) are a crutch for
people who can't manage to build a proper antenna to fool their
transmitter into thinking it has a proper antenna.




If you use low loss feedline and a tuner, it doesn't much matter how bad
the antenna's
SWR is. Low loss feedline means that you don't lose much RF energy as
it bounced
back off the bad antenna to the tuner, and then back to the antenna.
Actually, lossy
feedline can make your SWR look better. The propagation delays of
these bounces
are of little importance for the narrowband modes we use on HF (SSB, CW,
RTTY
and such). I use some old Ethernet cable (essentially foam RG8U) to run
the feed
from the shack upstairs down to the basement, and there I switch over to
coax
more weather resistant thru a small hole in the wall (caulked to keep
bugs out) to the
vertical in the back yard. It's a pre WARC multiband HF vertical.

A major reason for bad antennas is a lack of space or place to install a
good
antenna.