In a recent long running thread on impedance matching on one of the online fora, one poster offered the Ten-tec 540 manual as a reference for clarity on the subject (which of course got murkier with every posting as contributors added their version to the discussion).
The Ten-tec 540 was made in the late 1970s, one of the early radios with a solid state PA, and their manual give the Technical facts of life
to guide new owners to successful exploitation of this new technology.
Amongst the technical facts of life
is this little gem:
The standing wave ratio is a direct measure of the ratio between two impedances, ie an SWR of 3 to 1 tells us that one impedance is three times the other. Therefore the unknown impedance can be three times as large or three times as small as the known one. If the desired impedance that the transceiver wants to see is 50 ohms, and SWR of 3 to 1 on the line may mean a load impedance of either 150 or 17 ohms. …
This says that the SWR wrt 50Ω implies just two possible impedances, he is very wrong… it implies an infinite set of possible impedances. Continue reading Ten-tec on the meaning of SWR