[Antennas] The coons ate my antenna

[Jim Isbell]

About two weeks ago I was awakened in the night by noises in the 
bathroom.  I got up quietly and, in the nude, I crept up to the 
bathroom.  I dont know what I was going to do if there was an intruder 
in the bathroom, maybe scare him/her with the sight of my nude body, 
 but I wasn't thinking properly, I guess.  Anyway, when I got there I 
realized the noise was coming from above, at the skylight.  I flipped on 
the light and saw a coon looking back at me through the skylight.  He 
was apparently trying to open the skylight.  I scared him off with a 
broom and went back to bed.  

Last week I finally tuned up my S-Line for the first time and have been 
making contacts on 40 and 80 meters with good signal and audio reports. 
 But a 40 meter dipole on 80 meters is not the best and I went to the 
roof yesterday to look over the situation to see what kind of antenna I 
might put up.  Much to my surprise the coons had been chewing on the 
antenna and in fact had disconnected one side of the 450 ohm ladder line 
so that I was just connected on one side of my 40 meter dipole!

So I reconnected the line and went to retune the S-Line.  Now I dont get 
near as good a load as I did with one side disconnected!!!!

Do you think the coons were just real good antenna engineers???

Anyway, the whole thing is coming down to be replaced by with a parallel 
dipole.