Can I come back to a point you made earlier? You wrote.......

- Add a choke balun where the coax reaches the tuner (just take 8-10'
of the coax, and wind it into a loop 8-10" in diameter and use
tiewraps to hold it together). This will help maintain balance
between the two sides of the dipole.

There is not enough supplied Coax available to make the choke balun and
still reach my transciever. There are no markings on the cable supplied by
Icom but it looks like they use RG8U. I haven't purchased cable in many
years and seem to remember that insulation and shielding varies by
manufacturer. I'll look for maximum shielding but wonder whether foam
insulation is OK for the choke balun?

Sure, it should be fine. As with any coax, you should check the power
rating (lest you arc the cable or overheat it in use, but you
shouldn't have this problem with RG8 at reasonable power levels).
And, for the lengths we're talking about here, and at HF frequencies,
I suspect that RG8 may be overkill - you could use RG8X "mini" coax
and the losses would be quite tolerable.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember seeing something about the cons
of foam insulated coax. Am I getting paranoid?

Well, I believe that foam-insulated coax may be a bit more prone to
wick up water if you don't seal the connectors properly and the rain
starts to fall ;-)

For indoor applications this shouldn't matter. Just buy a 10-15'
piece of RG8 with PL-259 connectors on it, use a barrel adapter to
connect this to your existing run of coax, roll up the choke balun,
and you should be fine.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
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