Finally upgraded to General this winter, and found a Ten-Tec Triton IV
(my first HF rig) and I need some antenna help.

I need something simple that will give decent performance, and keep XYL
happy.

Some ideas I've come across:

1. A random loop strung in a few trees, fed with ladder line to ground
level, with a balun and lightning arrestor, into buried coax 50' or so
to the house and into the shack. This setup is the most aesthetically
pleasing, and coax will be easy to run in the house. How much will the
transition to coax hurt me here? Would I need a 1:1 or 4:1 balun? Some
other ratio?

2. Same random loop, fed with ladder line all the way into the shack.
Would probably give better performance, but running the ladder line in
the house will be more difficult, and the XYL is less likely to approve
of a wire in the air vs buried.

3. A dipole in one of the above configurations.

4. A random long wire strung around the yard, end-fed with coax and a balun.

I will be using an antenna tuner in the shack with any of these
configurations, and will be running a max of 100W for the foreseeable
future. How much do I have to worry about the wire touching the trees
at these power levels?

Thanks for any help you can give - I know these questions have probably
been asked a million times before

--
Keith