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« on: May 17, 2021, 1707 UTC »
Thanks to Chris, I built a 58 ft T2FD and got it hung in the back yard in test. The high end is up at about 48 ft with the antenna sloping at about 25 degrees with the low end up about 5 ft. The antenna is at the end of about 175 ft of 52 ohm coax heading to my Kiwis though a homebrew active splitter. I used a 900 ohm resistor and there's currently no balun.
Chris and I are only 120 miles apart or so, and it's interesting to compare results in our installations. While I'm super impressed with Chris's 120 ft T2, I'm not sure I could actually get that installed by myself.
My reference antenna (one that I left hooked up all the time to the Kiwis) was a trap dipole in the attic (30' up) that was only so so, and prone to lots of noise being emitted by all the junk in the house.
There's some "industrialization" that needs to happen to keep this thing in the air, but I'm impressed so far. S/N is MUCH improved over the noisy attic antenna. I'm looking forward to the nighttime results on 40M as my benchmark.
Thanks to Chris for the inspiration.