[ORAWA01]

Last night, cut the wire, and put up an antenna. I had to just go by with the garden limitation. I thought the garden was 20m x 20m, but it wa actually about 16-17m at max. And due to trees and hedges, it could only accommodate maximum 15m stretch of wire, and hung on the tree and bent L shaped for another 5m. And that is the centre element to 50 ohms coax.

And 5m of wire was connected to the coax outer braid, and then to the outside water tap, which is connected to the copper pipe of the mains water under the kitchen sink.

And it tunes 15, 20, 40 and 80m band with almost 1.1:1 SWR.

I worked a station in ST. Albans on 80M band CW at late night. I got 569, and he was 569-599 QSB. I was using about 40W pep.

The receiving on all bands has got really quiet (I mean much much less band noise but received signals were same or better), and I heard a 9K and VEs and K9s on 20M in early evening.

I will keep on experimenting with the LF band antenna getting more parts such as baluns, open wire feeders and wire for radials in the future. But will see how this antenna will perform for a while, and if it is no good, then will move on to maybe the Doublet or Loop or GP. Balanced dipole seems a challenge for this QTH due to the house building being at the side of the garden, and making feeder very long.

Here is rough sketch of my LF band antenna I put up last night. I don't know what it should be called. But I decided to make use of the outside tap as part of the earthing, and it seems working OK for tuning at least.

And the PSU doesn't make buzzing noise when tuning the 80M band either. Before it was quite bad with the buzz from the PSU. So some improvements are showing with the HF antenna now being outside.