From talks I’ve given on my price, performance and satisfaction with HF rigs, one constant question that I receive is about the ranking in the Sherwood Tables. Rob NC0B himself points out that the “top” rigs are about equal on the set of bench tests he publishes. He suggests that the reader take into account their personal preferences for ergonomics, size, weight, and so forth. My research on using the quadrant analysis approach took a similar tact in allocating rigs by measured receive performance per dollar and the collective satisfaction that other hams have expressed with each rig. But readers of the Sherwood Tables still focus in minute detail on the precise rank in making comparisons to the exclusion of both the metric used to make the ranks themselves or other rig characteristics.
In other words, from both Rob and me, don’t get “out-ranked” in using Rob’s very fine bench tests and his ranking them to let a higher rank be the sole determinant of your rig choice. Ranking matters. But so does the underlying metric upon which the ranks are based. Imagine a sports team returning home after a game, chanting “We’re Number Ten! We’re Number Ten!”. Yea, hard to imagine that. But if we had a measurement of how “good” teams were, those ranked #10 might be almost as good as those ranked #1. In theory. But let’s put that into practice with Rob’s Table of results.
Here’s a graph to illustrate how Rob ranks his tested rigs in his tables. As an ardent CW contest operator, he says that narrow (or close-in) dynamic range in dB is the single, most valid criterion to use to compare rigs. I do not disagree with him and defer that judgment completely. (I’m not even a CW operator.) But let’s examine how close in narrow dynamic range (NDR) some rigs are to those ranked just above them. This is an interactive chart. Hovering your cursor near a circle will reveal the rig. You can draw a box and zoom-in to that subset of the chart. This will allow you to distinguish several rigs that are grouped together. Please take note of the chart controls in the upper right section. They will save you time in navigation.
Bear in mind that the ranks in this table put the #1 rig at the left end of the chart (see annotation). While the ranks do flow from upper-left to lower-right as the narrow dynamic range gets worse, the key thing to note is the “bunching” of various groups of rigs. They are technically ranked higher or lower than those near them but they have almost the exact same narrow dynamic range numbers! In other words, “we’re number 10” here may not be as bad as we sports fans might think!