Our first antenna: a simple HF "long wire" antenna.
The antenna itself is a 63 foot length of multi-strand copper wire, running from the shack at one end to the eaves of the house at the other. It is approximately 15 feet above ground. Antennas of that sort are usually high imedance at the feed point. I have used a 9:1 "unun" impedance transformer. The inspiration for my design came from John, M0UKD's web page. Mine has 17 turns trifilar wound on a T130-6 toroid core. Ideally it would have had one or two more turns, but the core can only take so much wire and I didn't plan ahead....
The earth is a 1 metre long ground spike. I doubt that it is very high quality. For reasons of RF safety I put the transformer above head height because people will walk past it; that means there is approx 2.4 metres of wire from ground to the transformer. That's almost a quarter wave long at 28MHz. Ideally the transformer should be at ground level, and some users put the antenna wire in a plastic pipe to preserve RF safety.
Using an MFJ antenna analyzer I measured the following impedance and SWR values in the shack:
| Frequency | VSWR | Impedance |
| 1.85 | 10.3 | R=89 X=177 |
| 3.65 | 3.9 | R=19 X=48 |
| 7.05 | 14 | R=8 X=35 |
| 10 | 9.1 | R=25 X=87 |
| 14.2 | 4.5 | R=41 X=67 |
| 18 | 3.7 | R=2- X=32 |
| 21.2 | 4.6 | R=10 X=41 |
| 24 | 6.9 | R=8 X=15 |
| 29 | 3.5 | R=31 X=44 |
| 51 | 8.4 |
R=227 X=156 (unlikely to work well) |