Batboard

i was wondering if anyone had any info on the triton tla1060a antenna tuner. i tried doing a search on google and on this site but came up with nothing.
i was looking at picking up one off of ebay but with no info on it and not knowing what else might be needed to make it work has me a little concerned.
any info on it at all would be great.
thanks

Sounds like the HF tuner that was used with the Triton HF radio made in the 70's.

i guess the question is now, is it good for anything? is it a door stop or can it be used with another radio? any info at all would be great

I have catalog pages from 1980 for the Micom/Triton HF SSB line and I don't see that model listed.

I worked on a Micom base radio many years ago and the remote tuner had to be manually tuned for each channel to set it up. It would then tune to the preset for each channel when the base radio channel was changed.

There was a control cable with power and channel select lines between the base and the tuner. It was basically a mechanical contraption with a motor and cams to select the preset coil taps and capacitor settings.

It was a real PITA to tune and the settings were not very stable.

I don't know if that is similar to your TLA1060A.

I don't think any of these old Motorola tuners had any autotune capability like most state of the art tuners today.

thank you for the info. i do not have it yet and from what i see in the pictures it does require a decent sized control cable which it does not come with. the odds are it is like the one you mention. controled by the radio and not a true auto tuner. this info saved me from buying a door stop....

Documentation on these seems to be a huge problem.

There are later versions which are automatic tuners, however that is not as useful as it sounds because they expect to load an end-fed vertical whip of known length. Some are 2-9 MHz and some 2-18. Some want only a 23 foot whip, others are not specific in the manual as to what they expect.

The ones I have, use a microprocessor and VSWR sensor circuit to set up the correct inductors and tuned circuits, and are essentially automatic. To do this, the associated Micom / Triton radio puts out a "tune" signal at 3 Watts which the tuner then uses to set itself up for best VSWR. The radio can then apply full power. Thus, as they are, they are not that useful with anyone else's radio. These tuners do not have the big multi-pin connector on them and just have power and RF input connectors, with (I think) one or two other lines which tell the radio when to enter and exit the "tune" mode.

Motorola seems to have made a surprising variety of these tuners, and the manuals seem very hard to come by, making the whole thing quite confusing.