A few weeks my father popped over and we started the work to erect my new and upgraded random wire end fed antenna. I was hoping to increase the antenna length from 29 feet long to a much nicer 56 feet long and at the same time take it up to around 7 meter high at the highest point. Lets just say it got a bit over ambitious when we tried getting it vertical!!

After a lot of messing about we agreed to drop it back down to the ground and have a rethink.

A week later I’m delighted to confirm that the antenna is not up and working fantastically on all HF bands apart from 40 meters for some reason.

I dropped the idea of 56 feet and ended up at a more modest 41 feet and a hight of about 5.5 meter instead of 7 meters. The result is a very solid and stable antenna pole that I’m confident will withstand all but the worst winter storms. When they hit it will only take minutes to unhook the guy ropes and drop it all down to the ground until the storm passes.

SWR on all but 40 meters is below 2:1 so well within the capabilities of my radios internal turner apart from 40 meters where the SWR pops up to 5:1 for some reason. The internal tuner will not tune this high so I have added a mAT-30 external auto-tuner which integrates with the radio seamlessly and which will cope with the higher SWR on 40 meters.