So, my 'new' 40m End-Fed Half Wave wire antenna (which I can manually tune on 80m as well) has finally deposed the trusty Cushcraft AV4 from its prime position in the middle of the back lawn. As it's 20m long and my back garden isn't, it's currently draped over the roof of my shed at one end, so far from ideal. Even like that, it still outperforms my old Cushcraft vertical, so I thought I'd try and benchmark it as it is, for future reference.
It's eventually going to be in a full 'inverted L' configuration, but for now it's more like a very pointy inverted V. The far end will be raised from its current lowly 2m height to a relatively lofty 10m which should improve both transmit and receive conditions significantly. It's also a few inches too long, but that's insurance for tuning once in its final position.
Anyway, I wanted to 'document' what it can do right now, hence my recording the net this morning, propagation conditions notwithstanding. I streamed it on Zoom and simultaneously recorded it to my hard drive. After a bit of basic audio editing for duration etc. I thought that there may be other people that would be interested in hearing it. Maybe some visitors to the website who don't currently have a radio and wonder what's going on, or some of our overseas friends who might like to compare the results to one or more of the popular WebSDRs. I could hear everyone bar Sean and Gerry in Ireland, though I'm suffering from a terribly high noise floor (and rampant common mode currents on transmit) in this lashed-up incarnation.
So download it if you wish. It's about 37Mb in size and runs for approximately 50 minutes. It's in .m4a format (playable with most media players).
Berni M0XYF
