[SOC] Looking for usleless advise

[Dan W. Dooley]

Hey, let's face it, if I was looking for sound advice, would I be asking
THIS list?

I'm only kidding guys.  All in fun.

Here's my dilemma.  I've got a pretty good antenna that does a respectable
job on the HF bands.  No, not like having big, high up, high gain beams, or
big exotic phased arrays or something like that, but for a multi-band
radiator, it works doggone well.  That is my Butternut HF9V vertical
elevated to 18 ft. at the base with resonant radials for all bands.  I get a
respectable amount of DX with it and though I may have to work patiently
through heavy pileups, I generally always get through eventually.  Sometimes
I get through on the first or second call too.

So....  I guess I should have started that previous paragraph with "my
setup" or something like that as it didn't touch on the dilemma at all.  Oh
well.  Here it is.  The antenna is narrow as a toothpick on 80 meters.  No
surprise there.  It does very well in a very narrow bandwidth of about 50
KHz.  That limits me to choosing one part of the band and pretty much
staying there.  To change to a different part requires physically
lengthening or shortening a big coil on the antenna.  That's not easy to do
as I have to lower the antenna, and get up on the roof to reach the coil and
then the correct resonant point is touchy to reach.

I like to work the digital modes on 80 (primarily PSK31) so I have it tuned
for 3580.  Running 2 watts, I can cover pretty much all of the North
American continent on this band.  That's great if PSK31 is all I want to do
on 80.  It's not.  Last night, I see on one of the DX spots that the Cocos
Isl group is on 3795 (listening just above 3800).  I tune the rig up there
and I can hear them ok.  That being the case, they should be able to hear
me.  Problem is, no way was my antenna going to go there.  I even tried
running it through the Dentron SuperTuner I have here.  The built in tuner
in the radio (Kenwood TS-2000) wasn't going to handle the task either.

So, methinks another antenna is in order.  Not to replace the Butternut, but
to suplement it on 80.  And, that's my question.  What?  If I had a couple
of 75 ft tall trees in the yard and they were far apart, the answer would be
simple.  My tallest trees are less than 35 ft high.  I could build some sort
of loop and run it around the eves of the house.  It would be pretty long,
that's for sure, but it wouldn't be very high.  The city limits my over all
antenna height to 35 ft. so that rules out a lot of possibilities.

So back to the loop.  I suspect that I could get it to tune the entire band
with the tuner, especially if I fed it with open wire or at least twin lead.
But, at the height, what kind of range could I expect?  Would I simply be
burning holes in the clouds?

Looking for ideas, folks.

Dan W. Dooley  WB5TKA  Bedford, Texas
    e-mail to: dandooley@pipeline.com
    Web site: http://www.qsl.net/wb9tka
May Goddes love blest ye alle
"Ancient Pistol, I do partly understand your meaning."