wrote in message . ..
put up the longest dipole you can as high as you can and load it with a
tuner... that is the easiest and fastest way. if you have an 80m dipole
that will work ok to try it out.

Unless you have a legal-limit tuner, or are going to use QRP power levels, I
would advise against that.
If the dipole is coax fed and is 80M 1/2 wavelength, at 100 watts out there
is going to be some crazy-high RF voltages inside that tuner. If it's an MFJ
300 watt tuner, more than likely it's going to arc like a welder.
Feeding the dipole with ladder-line is a different story......

Not much. It's still a pretty bad scenario even with ladder line, on
say a T net tuner.
If all a person can do is use a 80 dipole, it usually best to short
the feedline together, or just feed the center pin, and feed the whole
thing as a vertical using the tuner to match. Will usually work much
better on 160m, than feeding a 80 dipole normally. You'll hear the
noise/signal level pop way up when you feed it this way compared to as
a half dipole with all the resulting tuner loss. MK