You guys heard me gripe about the difficulties of a fan dipole,
especially with close element spacing, last week. I spent some more
time cutting and pruning and rehanging and just gave up because the
damn thing never had a resonance fall anywhere in the 40M band.

I just obliviated all the issues by getting rid of everything except
for the 135foot element, and replacing the feed coax with 450-ohm
ladder line on the back of my antenna tuner (Ten Tec 277). The antenna
loads up very nicely on all the ham bands, and although the patterns
on the upper bands are certainly different than a dipole, they were
just fine for doing some DX'ing yesterday. Lotsa fun!

I had previously worried about the gotchas of routing ladder line into
my shack but it really wasn't so hard.

Tim N3QE