G3VGR Remote LDG AT-11      

I am a great fan of the LDG family of tuners, owning both an AT-11 and the original QRP tuner. They give great performance and tune almost any antenna in a few seconds. Both tuners were purchased as kits direct from LDG. The QRP Tuner kit was purchased with the optional enclosure for use indoors with my Sierra. I purchased the AT-11 kit without the enclosure because my intention was to use it remotely to match an 80m 3/8 wave endfed Marconi at the bottom of the garden.

To manually control the tuner, I built this remote head in a small aluminium box. To tune the antenna, I transmitted a low power (5 watts) carrier and pressed the Tune button to initiate the tuning cycle.
 
The completed AT-11 board was mounted on an aluminium plate in a Maplin Electronics waterproof box. The Tuner was located at the bottom of the garden. Both DC and control/indicator signals were routed via some CAT-5 cable to the remote head in the shack.
 
LDG AT-11 Remote This setup worked successfully, however when I started using my IC706, the idea of using the tuner switch on the front panel instead of the remote head became quite appealing. The new AT-11MP tuner had extra circuitry to enable this function. LDG introduced the ACC-11 kit to retrofit the AT-11 and provide this functionality. I obtained the ACC-11 and modified my tuner. The accessory board was mounted on the wall of the box using hotglue. The complete remote head is now redundant and a 4 way cable used between the shack and remote tuner. I set the IC706 to enable PTT Tune, so now when I change bands, all I need to do is just send a dit with the CW paddle and the AT11 starts a tune cycle.

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