I began amateur radio as a Technician class licensee (KD4ENH), upgraded shortly thereafter to Advanced class and now hold an Extra class license. Propagation permitting, I operate regularly on HF using primarily digital modes : mostly PSK and RTTY.
Professionally, I work as an Applications Engineer at Rohde and Schwarz covering RF test and measurement equipment, so Amateur Radio is a nice complement to my "day job".
My station setup is very modest : an ICOM 718 with an AH-4 tuner. For a variety of reasons, I use indoor antennas for all of my HF activity. Before 2005, I was using a 7 meter end-fed random wire in the attic.
The wire was (allegedly) "balanced" by using a similar piece of wire as a counterpoise. Due to a number of RFI issues and lackluster performance, I eventually decided to move to a real dipole which I connected to the AH-4 via ladder line.
The dipole itself is made of 33 feet of regular antenna wire (about the length of my attic), which happily corresponds to the 20m PSK frequency (14.070 MHz). The dipole is connected to the ladder line via a ladder lock connector.
Icom officially disavows connecting the AH-4 this way (splitting the ladder line and attaching the two conductors to the top and bottom of the AH-4), but it works just fine.
The dipole has solved most of the RFI issues as long as I don't have large metal objects (i.e. other antennas) in the attic.
Thanks and 73!
I enjoy sending and receiving paper QSLs and will gladly QSL any and all contacts. You can either QSL directly (address at QRZ.com) or via the Buro.