Ah, you evidently missed the relatively brief period of a few years
during which John Bliss was making his revered Bliss Matchmasters. I
say this in the past tense because I just googled and looked at his
website (google Bliss Air and Water King), and found no mention of him
or the Matchmaster so I fear he has quit making them.
But, a few years ago, you could have purchased a custom built wx proof
enclosed matching network, remotable with motorized inductors and
vacuum variable cap and a control head with your choice of
watt/swr/reflected power metering, for in the neighborhood of $2000
depending on how you wanted him to build it. He could have made it
for balanced or unbalanced loads or maybe both, and he did a beautiful
job and they took all the legal limit power you wanted to give them
and then some. I bought one of the last manual non-remote
Matchmasters before he quit making them to focus only on the motorized
remotable ones which were way out of my price range. For that, we
spoke on the phone a couple of times having a nice chat while he sort
of "interviewed" me about what I wanted, then I waited about four or
five months and $800 later my Matchmaster arrived in a big box with
dual inductors on a common shaft and a Jennings 1000 pF vacuum
variable cap that could be switched between the low and high Z side
and a nice cross needle going and returning watt meter. It's been
doing a great job on my 600 ohm ladder line from 80 to 10 meters ever
since I bought it in (I think) 2002. The insanely high price for a
tuner then, doesn't seem all that crazy these days (check Palstar's
prices) but anyway, none of this does you any good. It does however
explain why there aren't many 1.5 or 2 kw+ remote matching networks
for sale--not enough hams willing to plunk down the $$$ which is about
what a new AL-82 costs. Those who want such a beast probably homebrew
them.
73
rob / k5uj
p.s. forgot about this:
http://www.arraysolutions.com/Products/heinz_bolli_sams.htm
He was at Dayton in 2007 when I was there. Take a look at those prices.
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