How many "geeks" these days know what a SWR is let alone what to do about >it?
I do. But then again, I'm a balding grey-haired 72-year-old "geek." When I worked for Bell Labs designing broad-band microwave systems, we used return loss rather than SWR, because the numbers made it easier to visualize what was happening. We had to keep each individual echo to about 70 dB below the signal. This translated to a 35 dB return-loss requirement for each component. In SWR terms, that was
1.035. One day, we visited a manufacturer of waveguide parts: bends, transitions, etc. They were used to SWR's of 1.2, and couldn't believe that we were serious about 35 dB retun losses. But that's what it took to transmit 1860 multiplexed voice circuits with low intermod noise, and later 3 DS-3's using 64QAM modulation with adequate fade margin, over a 30-MHz wide 6 GHz channel 3000 miles from coast to coast.Dick Grady, AC7EL