General Musings of a Wire Antenna Junkie

• It's only a bad idea if it doesn't work.
• I use a tuner, not tuned antennas. Camping out on a band then twiddling knobs for a minute never killed anyone.
• 9:1 toroid unun/balun is a miracle worker.
• 85 feet seems to be a magic number for 160-10, sometimes even 6. String it in a tree and load with a 9:1 and some counterpoise. If it doesn't work right try a capacitance hat. If it's worse with the capacitance hat then don't use one.
• 1:1 wound over a bolt can be paired with the 9:1 so the unun is more of a balun as well. evidently this chokes all the bad currents into undisciplined metal, no need to use disciplined metal for this, save it for transformers
• Nothing wrong with a bottom-fed (horizontal) delta loop, they work just fine.
• Always see what Uncle Doug (SK W1FB) has to say
• There are PDFs of golden-age ARRL antenna book online, check there too
• Homemade ladder line is more rugged than i would have imagined
• A 1:1 isolator unun at the feedpoint really does clean up a lot of RF issues with these end-fed antennas. The MFJ-915 has exceeded my expectations, even after winding some common mode chokes around a ring.

 (more to come)