[steveo]

I love 10M, next to 40 my favorite. To those reading that have never operated on 10, when conditions are right you can talk all over the world with a modest radio and antenna set-up.

I could talk to hams in Europe and Africa in the morning and to the eastern Pacific in the afternoon.

Great hobby... keeps the brain cells working.

[Clinging Bitterly]

40 I haven't worked so much yet, I don't have quite enough antenna to compete. After my long hiatus from the hobby I went for a quick antenna solution at home and in my somewhat limited space I stretched out a G5RV early this spring (while it was still snowing). Now, I can testify to this particular antenna's effectiveness on 20M but despite the hype I'm not impressed with it on any other band. Sure it'll tune easy just about anywhere but 60M (and with some difficulty even there), but it is clear it doesn't deliver either efficiency or a good radiation pattern anywhere but 20M.

Now that the good antenna weather is returning (wind & rain plus some ice) I aim to get busy putting some other sizes/shapes of metal in the air. I can, after figuring out one far corner support, pretty easily fit a full wave 80M loop (at less than optimum height) and with balanced line and my tuner I might get something out of that. The biggest handicap at my location is received noise on the lower bands and perhaps the loop will solve some of that.

For a 10M antenna I seem to have collected an abundance of 75 Ohm TV coax and I'm going to try what I call a coaxial 1/2 wave (I have seen it called a vertical bazooka) or maybe an end fed like a j-pole, slim-jim, or zepp variant. I don't think there’d be much benefit in going to the extra trouble putting together a 5/8 wave but if someone gave me one ready made I'd take it.

[DYngbld]

Several years ago we worked a contest (CQWW) from Iceland with a /TF8 call. 10m opened up and oh my the pileups we had. We had something like 150watts, onto a slope antenna attached to a chain link fence, and a microwave tower. I think we worked 50 countries on 10m.