home-brew vswr meter

How minimal of circuit would be required to tell the difference between whether a load was inductively reactive or capacitively reactive at frequencies between 100mhz and 200mhz, and in the 5 to 100 watts range? A home made VSWR meter, for someone who doesn't have access to a store-bought one, basically.

A VSWR meter won't tell you that, just that there's a mismatch. Start longer and prune for best VSWR. That's as simple as a couple of diodes, a meter, and some resistors and/or a pot - maybe a power range switch in leiu of the pot and a switch for forwared/reflected power. Additionally you'd need some type of directional coupler - 2 parallel PCB traces... or a piece of insulated 24 AWG wire threaded under a length of coax braid... or a torroidal coil with the coax running through it. Unless you can get a crossed-needle display, you'll have to calculate the VSWR from the fwd/rev readings or just prune until the reflection are minimum. Knowing the VSWR would help you compare with other antennas.

Oh, yeah. Is google's server down or something?

If, by "VSWR meter", you mean the usual directionally sampled line arrangement, it won't tell you. What it actually measures is forward and reflected *current*, hence power. Whether the mismatched load is resistive, capacitive, or inductive, it neither knows nor cares.

Google for "VHF bridge", and see if that gives you any ideas

I'm not sure I understand your point Mike --- what do you mean by, "Oh, yeah. Is google's server down or something?"