My legs are now a bit stiff and sore from going up and down a ladder for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Made a homebrew dipole with some cut and drilled $2 shop polyethylene chopping board and some cheap coax and wire from Jaycar. I used coax wound around a little toroid as a common mode choke

Managed to get it up about 10m above ground, and only smashed one tile in the process! Have some plastic over the hole, and will be back up to fix that next weekend.

I had to go up a few times as I was tuning it, too long to start with, then not quite short enough, then too short, finally got it! It has a 1.2SWR between 14.000 and 14.75MHz, which I think is good enough for now. I ended up with close to 9.52m of wire, as recommended by various hams, I’ve reduced the length by folding back about 70cm on each end.

I don’t get the S-Meter pegging that I see with the end fed antenna. Which I think may be to RF energy getting in to the Mic leads. Will investigate!

It appears to work well, have received WSPR from Europe and NZ with it, with audio going to my PC via an isolated attunuator, more on this in a future post! Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few contacts on it this weekend!