Ok, so I acquired a YT-1200 automatic tuner some time ago but left it gathering dust as I had always planned to add more bits of wet string to my loft fan dipole for other bands. The tuner was going to go on the long wire that I never got round to making via a 9:1 un-un which is wound but not soldered up and looking sorry for itself in a corner of the workshop. Plus there has been a lot of FT8 activity on 20m anyway and the internal tuner in the FT450D is happy there.
Well, I set this thing up last night and it happily tunes from 80m to 6m (not tried 160m yet). The fan dipole has two elements, one cut for 20m and one for 6m, but I’ve now made FT8 contacts on 40m, 30m, 17m and 15m, not bad for a bit of wire stapled to the rafters and 10W or however much actually makes it out of the tuner.
Yes it’s not a mega-station with a beam or even any kind of external antenna (yet!) but it works for me, aided of course by FT8 being a weak signal mode – my signal must be pretty weak!
Edit: I’ve now managed one FT8 QSO on 12m and today (5/Nov) one on 10m. 80m is probably a lost cause right now as although the tuner seems to tune it ok the rig is not happy. But there is a serious lack of wire up in the loft so not a big surprise.