OK....here's what I originally had that worked very well on both the 40 and 75/80 meter bands.....
Twisted and covered wire stripped out of old #10 gauge fire service extension chord. It exited my tuner on the east side of my garage, was hung insulated from the fascia board around to the back peak of the roof, from there it was suspended to a tree with a PVC pipe insulator, with a pigtail running back down on an angle, again with a PVC pipe insulator and terminated about 3 foot above the top of my wood fence. No ground radials were used, and the grounding rod is located at the front east side of the garage.
When I re-installed this antenna, everything followed the same path, but I removed what was the pigtail portion, and just terminated the slightly shortened version at the tree. This resulted in being able to tune up the 75/80 meter band, but not the 40.
Now I also have a separate ground rod on the west side of the garage as a lightning ground for the Big Stick vertical.
Taking into account of what Doc & Mole suggested, I first tied the two ground rods together with a length of the #10 gauge twisted wire, so now both grounds are tied into each other, then I added two radils to the secondary ground rod since it is virtually right under where the random wire runs. One radil follows the west wall of the garage, and the other much longer one follows the back yard fence along the path of the random wire antenna, past it to the side yard fence.
Now to see if there's any improvement....
:blink:.....DUH.....Yeah....there was......:blink:
Flatter on 75/80, and a dead flat 1.1:1 on 40....
Now there's not much action on 40 meters at the moment, at least nothing I'm picking up with a good clear solid signal, so I really don't know how much of an improvement this will be, and I'm sure from the results two radials and tying both grounds together made, a few more ground radials wouldn't hurt...
My only problem is I have a 20 foot round swimming pool in the way, that and I'm out of wire now.....
Later usually after 5:00 pm there's a group on 3.814.0 Mhz that I'll try and get a signal report from....assuming I can get a word in edge wise with these ratchet jawed rag chewers.......
