It feels like a bit of a never ending quest but I think my antenna is now the best it can be for the space and hight I have available to me.

After the disastrous attempt at a 56 foot random wire which would have killed people if it fell over (and it would have fallen over!!) I scaled back to just 41 foot in length. This was great and opened up more bands and improved the bands I was already using. Only problem was the SWR on 40 meter was at about 5:1 so the internal tuner/matcher wouldn’t bring it in. So I used a mAT-30 external tuner.

Today, after a lot of thinking I decided to add in an extra 6 foot of wire to bring the antenna to a respectable 47 foot in length. A vast improvement on my first working antenna of just 29 foot and an even bigger improvement on my proof of concept antenna at just 16 foot long when I started this project back in March.

I’m not expecting a massive improvement over the 41 foot version and I need to do some proper testing but I have noticed straight out of the box the raw SWR on 40 meters has dropped from 5:1 to 2.5:1 which means I could revert back to the internal tuner/matcher if I wanted to.

I think however that I will stick with the external tuner/matcher because it’s way faster.