who where wrote:
I suspect that the design of the MFJ antenna was done in a way which
places the parasitic elements close enough to reduce the folded
dipole's impedance to somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 ohms. All
that would be necessary, then, to allow a direct feed from a 50-ohm
coax, would be a choke balun (to convert the unbalanced coax feed to a
balanced drive to the folded dipole, without altering the impedance).

The presense and spacing of the parasitic elements isn't going to
change the feedpoint impedance that much.

Wrong. It can change it a lot. It can take a 50 ohm DE and move it to
10 ohms or less. And then there's the reactive part.

tom
K0TAR