Bob wrote:

Hi
We have put together a dipole, each leg is 66 feet. We put a 1:1 balun and
it is running about 60 feet of 50 ohm coax. Presently it is about half way
up the tower it is intended for so we could check the SWR before getting it
up to the highest point. Presently each leg has some lags and dips, no major
bends but it is just hanging there, over some bushes and the entire thing is
over top of the house, and not touching anything but is very close to some
steel guy wires (uninsulated).
Now we can only tune this down to a useable SWR on the 80m band. On all
other bands we cannot tune it down to a safe operating range. We are using a
good antenna tuner but cannot get anything useable except for 80m. Here we
are able to tune the SWR right down.

Questions???
Would we be better without that balun?

The antenna is a non-resonant length on most of the other HF bands. You
cannot afford the SWR power loss when feeding it with coax on any band except
80m. Take a look on my web page how I solved the all-HF-band problem using
essentially the same type of dipole. You need to feed such an antenna with
twinlead, window-line, ladder-line, or open-wire line. That moves the balun
to the hamshack. 100 ft. of ladder-line is close to optimum.

Is the fact that the dipole is still too low and close to the guy wires (
but not touching) our problem?

That may be part of your problem but not the biggest part.
--
73, Cecil, http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp



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