"IanT" wrote in
:

Ok, so that's two people saying that could work, and sure, I won't be
relying
on a single narrow range, I want to see what's out there and
detectable. I might want to limit peaks and troughs in sensitivity by
using a 9:1 transformer though, as I read several times that it is a
useful way to do that for general SW listening via a long wire. That
alone means I probably DO
need to care about impedance matching.

You need an impedance matching device otherwise incorrectly called
"antenna tuning unit". It doesn't tune the antenna, it only matches the
impedance
for a given frequency. The main loss will be with the aerial NOT being
resonant at your chosen frequency.
The only way you are going to find out is try what people have
suggested, then compare the results for yourself.


Thanks, that could be useful. I've heard of them, wasn't sure if I'd need
something beyond a means to reduce peaks and troughs in resonance or
sensitivity across bands while trying to match impedance though. I read some
old posts by John Doty (archived on web sites) that suggested that a single
device could be set and placed at the end of the antenna wire and grounded
there too, and then weatherproofed and ignored. It's an attractive idea.