Part of our The Xiegu G90: The Complete Guide.
The built-in tuner is one of the main reasons I recommend the G90 to people building their first portable HF kit. It’s not just a checkbox feature. It’s genuinely one of the better internal tuners I’ve used at this price point, and it changes what you can get away with antenna-wise in the field.
What It Can Match
The G90’s internal tuner will happily match random wire antennas, end-fed half-waves, and other high-impedance loads across a wide range, as long as you’re not asking it to tune something wildly off the deep end. I run mine most often with a random wire or an EFHW and it finds a match in a few seconds almost every time.
What It Struggles With
Very short, badly mismatched antennas, or anything presenting an extreme impedance, will push it past what the internal tuner can handle. If you’re trying to load up a stub of wire that’s nowhere near resonant on your operating band, you’ll see it fail to find a match, or find one that’s technically low SWR but doing you no favors on radiated power. That’s where a counterpoise or a slightly longer radiator solves the problem faster than fighting the tuner.
Tuning Speed and Memory
Once it’s found a match on a given band and antenna combination, it remembers it, so band changes at the same site are fast after the first tune. If you’re bouncing around bands during a POTA activation, that memory is doing more work than people give it credit for.
When You Still Want an External Tuner
If you’re running a permanent or semi-permanent wire antenna with a known bad match, or you want more tuning range than the internal unit offers, an external tuner still has a place. But for the kind of grab-and-go field work the G90 is built for, I leave the external tuner at home almost every time. That’s the whole point of the radio.