I have (as I may have noted below at some point) an LDG YT-450 tuner that goes with my Yaesu FT-450D. I actually have two of them, the first one having had the smoke let out of it one time when I was on 6 meters and forgot to kick it out. The second one has never really been happy, and in fact seems to have an advanced case of Alzheimer's, because whenever I switch bands, I have re-tune from scratch. That isn't supposed to be the way of things, and I figured one of these days I'd get another tuner (possibly the new YT-1200) and send the YT-450 back to LDG to see if they could figure it out. But the YT-1200 doesn't seem to be generally-available yet and I got tired of waiting.
So just for laughs and giggles, I purchased an MFJ-949E manual tuner and hooked it up this weekend.
Holeee shite. The difference is like night and day. I worked W1AW/KL7 on 20m SSB on Saturday and it sounded like she was right there in the room with me. Shoot, I even worked a Brit on 17m SSB, and he gave me a 55 (unfortunately I had to give him a 45 and it was probably worse than that, really, but I was able to pull him out of the noise). And digital modes, shoot, I was seeing prefixes I'd never seen before.
The only problem, of course, is that it's a MANUAL tuner, so of course I have been keeping copious notes of what settings I'm using for what. But hell, I'm not complaining.
People bitch about MFJ all the time but in this case (other than a bad front panel fit that keeps the meter light switch from pushing in and out expeditiously) I'm certainly happy with their product.