Palomar Engineers PT-340 Tuner Tuner

Long Long ago, there was a company named Palomar Engineers.  Their most famous product , a noise bridge, was inexpensive and had a lot of uses.  Palomar Engineers repackaged a portion of the noise bridge circuitry into a product designed specifically to allow you to tune your antenna tuner without putting a signal on the air.  That product was the PT-340 Tuner Tuner.

I strive to be a polite ham and due as little on-the-air tuning as possible.  A couple of weeks ago this PT-340 popped up in the QTH.com classifieds and I bought it, and I’m really impressed with it.

It certainly lets me tune my antenna tuner off-the-air.  The thing that really impresses me however is that I can tune my Drake MN-2000 Antenna Tuner much faster and more accurately than by conventional means.

With the the radio set to receive on the desired frequency, I turn on the PT-340.  It injects a white noise signal.  Then I tune my MN-2000 tuner to null out the white noise.  That’s it. (Then I turn off the PT-340, of course).

I’m surprised that modern antenna tuners don’t have this function built in.