"Bob" wrote in message ...
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.

That is normal, without the tuner...
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.

Thats not totally normal, but could be a tuner deficiency...

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

No, it's 1:1.

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

That can mess things up, for sure.

Any suggestions please??

#1, feeding an all band dipole with coax is a mistake. Your feed
losses will be very high on most all other bands, except 80. If you
want to use it for all bands with a tuner, you would be better off
feeding it with ladder line, or twin lead. MK