Mike,
I'm no fan of MFJ, but I have had reasonable luck with an MFJ-986
Differential tuner. I am near Detroit, and used it to tune a 61 foot
W9INN dipole fed with coax and a 132 ft dipole fed with open wire on
160. It was good in the respect that it had the tuning range to load
those antennas on 160. Over the last year or two, I have worked Europe,
the Caribbean and Hawaii on 160 and always managed to place in the
middle of the pack or higher in Michigan in the various 160 cw contests.
It was bad in that I have had to replace the rotary inductor twice (once
under warranty), the switch, diodes in the SWR bridge and a bad solder
joint (the knobs, case and capacitor were OK ;-). Currently, I'm using
the equivalent of a home-brew version of the XM tuner (only bigger) that
I got for $100 at a local swap :-) !!!
If you are running 100 watts, the "3kw" MFJ tuners should be fine, but
don't try to get away with a "300 watt" tuner. When you are trying to
load a short antenna on 160, the reactance is quite high and E still= I
X R and you will see a lot of fireworks with a so called 300 w tuner
even at 100 w.
I am a fan of Ten Tec and have an Omni 6+ and Centurion but never had
any TT tuners. Sounds like the reviewer that you quoted was not a happy
camper, but hey, as much as we would like to think so, even TT isn't
perfect.
BTW, what is a CTSVR antenna?
Good luck,
73/Carter/K8VT
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