After talking about my little project for the past couple of weeks I finally got to
work. I used my slingshot to shoot a small weight into our tall tree in the center
of our backyard. The weight is attached to fishing line and reel. I was able to quickly
pull up a light weight rope/string and then pull up a medium strength line and my
copper wire. It took about an hour to hang and tune the new antenna for 30m.

I was a little bit nervous about how well the antenna would tune up given that my
modeling of the antenna several months (using one of NEC engines) ago did not
look very promising. Their are about 20 radials that are cut for 1/4 wave length long @
40m (1/8 wave @ 75m/80m) and 2 radials that are 1/4 wave length long at 160m. We used
1000 feet of wire for the radial project in the spring of 2004. The 30m antenna was
kind of interesting to tune up.

I have an MFJ
analyzer and had a hard time find a sweet spot which should have been close to
23 feet. I searched the range of frequencies like I normally do to determine how long
or short I might be only to discover that I couldn't find much of anything that was
resonant. I took an educated guess and figure that my antenna was too long (or tuned
too low) and start shortening it up about 4 inches at a time. Eventually after
about 5 minutes of this process the SWR started to really make some serious improvement.
I was watching the X value start to really drop and the antenna was becoming resonant
near it's final reseting spot.

In the end the antenna tune up right where I wanted it at 10.125 MHz with an SWR of
1.3:1. Currently I have antennas for the following HF bands: 160m,
80m, 75m, 40m, 30m, and a beam for 20m,
15m, and 10m. I also have beams for VHF/UHF bands: 6m,
2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and 1.2 GHz (I need to finish building my 1296 transverter and
my 10GHz system.)

73 de NG0R