For a while now I used a 56 meter (184 foot) long horizontal loop, hung up in our back yard. It kind of works for 160, 80 and 40 meter. On higher bands it did not work well. Actually I could not get out of Europe on it.Therefor I hung up a Fritzel FD4 a while ago. But that’s a a bit too long for our garden, I had to fold the last meters back. The neighbors weren’t that happy with all that wire neither. So I removed it a few weeks ago. It’s a shame I had to take it down because it worked really well! The other day I found out about the FD4’s little brother: the FD3. With it’s 20,7 meter I’m able to put that up without have to hang wires all over the garden. The only drawback is didn’t cover 80m, only 40, 20 and 10 meters. I figured as with the FD4, the FD3 should be able to cover 30, 17, 15 and 12 meters as well with use of a tuner. No 80 or 160 meters anymore. But I’m not all in tears about that. 160 meters is unusable anyway (too much QRM) and 80 is a difficult band to work DX when your in inhabited area. Last Saturday it was a dry day (after weeks of rain) so I climbed up the roof and removed the wire loop. I put up a little plastic mast of 3,5 meter length attached to the chimney. I put a little pulley on the top to be able to lower the balun without have to lower the mast. Put up an old Fritzel 70-series 1:6 balun I found in my junk box and attached 2 wires to it. One 13,8 meter to the back yard and one 6,9 meter to the front yard. I used the same plastic poles (obsolete army stuff) of 3,5 meters high to give the ends a little height. I didn’t had much time to test it, but a quick cq gave results on reverse beacon network from Iceland (21dB), Canada(11dB) and the USA(11dB) on 20 meter. So I figured: at least I’m able to reach outside of Europe again!

Hope to work some nice DX again.