The article regarding SWR is correct. As long as the transmitter sees an "impedance" that it is happy with and you have low-loss feedline, you will be able to radiate and make contacts.
I have a 300 ft "flat top", random length, antenna fed with 100 ft of balanced ladder line. I have no idea what the actual SWR is; however, my feedline loses are very small based on the ARRL table in their antenna handbook. I am unable to match to this antenna with the Flex-5000 tuner (with a balun between the feed line and the Flex), so I use a Balanced PAL tuner that appears to match to anything. In your case, make sure that you have a very good RF ground, you might then try short lengths of wire with an external antenna tuner. If the length between the wire and the tuner is short, RG8 or similar COAX will exhibit little loss. I have used short lengths of wire, to about 8 feet, on 80 meters with an external tuner and have made a fair amount of contacts with 25 watts. I do admit that I had a lot of "RF" around the shack (little RF sparks here and there ) until I installed a good RF ground with multiple 8' ground rods. I admit that my note had a lot of generalizations that others may take issue with; however, I encourage you to try the short antenna, short coax feed line, good RF ground approach. I am sure that you will make some good contacts! George K2CM/Apalachin, NY _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
