FlexRadio 4o3a TGXL Tuner Genius Has Arrived! (Unboxing)

UPS delivered a long awaited addition to the K9ZW ham shack, arriving of course on the only day I was out of town.

I removed what I thought was the inner box from the big generic shipping box filled with packing beans, a box that UPS had roughed up a bit in transit. Final unboxing was deferred to Saturday June 19th 20201 as I wanted to put this tuner into use for some weekend work.

First a few unboxing photos:

Outer Box of the 4o3a packaging

Opened – inner box, quick start notes and of course more packing beans

The quick start information sheet

4o3a inner packaging uses their special packing tape

Opened the inner box to find the unit plastic wrapped cradled in Styrofoam

First glance of the actual tuner

Crimped on the powerpoles, which I am using on the Flex Rack basically because of the lack of time to swap them for positive connectors:

Quick job to put on power cable Powerpoles

Swapped in the 4o3a TGXL where the Palstar AT-AUTO was.

Added a CAT6e jumper. Downloaded the Tuner Genius XL Utility and User Manual from the FlexRadio Systems website.

Updated the firmware (took a moment) and started using the tuner.

Trusty, but out of production, Palstar HF-AUTO

The new 4o3a tuner in place and powered up

I will have to decide if I want to move radio gear around, but here is the current rack layout:

PGXL amp is the bottom unit, TGXL is right above the double power supply, Flex-6700 in use is the top one.

Ran some “loafing power” (amp output 350-400w  with the radio set to 14w) to make sure everything worked okay:

SmartSDR, PGXL amp Utility and TGXL tuner Utility in use.

Operative word: FAST On 80 to 6m on the Zero-Five Flagpole Vertical Antenna great matches were found quickly (like a fraction of the other tuner) and the switch between time is super quick.

My Flagpole antenna is far from resonant on 160m, and I did not achieve a match as the initial mismatch errored the tune process out.

Of course I should read the TGXL manual.  So much was intuitive that it didn’t seem important (yet.)

The PGXL is presently better integrated into SmartSDR.  Future SmartSDR releases will hopefully bring the TGXL integration up to the same level – maybe even adding the RG (Rotator Genius rotator control) and AG (Antenna Genius switch) along the way?

This TGXL antenna tuner is very slick!

73

Steve
K9ZW