phaedrus wrote:
Hi guys, long time no see.

Well for various reasons I missed out on the last two solar peaks and
with another one comin' down the pike not so very far away I'm
determined not to miss out on that one, too. Trouble is, I'm several
floors up in a metropolitan area. It's not as bad as New York, but
nevertheless very far from ideal.

Any suggestions for an antenna type that's discreet (or at least not
too outrageous) that gets out well at HF? Anything from 80m through
10m I'll take whatever I can get. I know given my geographical
limitations I have to be realistic so I'm not looking at winning any
contests or working DX every night. Just don't want to miss out
entirely yet again. Any suggestions?

Got a outside facing window?
Balcony?

A 20 foot "black widow" collapsible fishing pole (try Cabelas online..
they run about $20 each, as of a couple years ago) can easily support a
pretty long wire hanging down away from the side of the building. You
have to think about the "other side" of the antenna, but another wire
serves there. If you have multiple windows, or some way to stick the
wire to the side of the building, you can make a sort of "limited
radials" scheme (think of a ground plane vertical turned on its side).

A tuner at the base of the antenna makes the mismatch issue go away, and
you can run the coax from the tuner to your rig. The SGC-239 is
convenient and works pretty well. (if you want to hop around bands or
within a band, having to reset a manual tuner each time gets old, real
fast, especially if the tuner is sitting on the windowsill or balcony
rail at the "feedpoint" and the rig is inside on the table where it's
more comfortable.

lay in a good pile of appropriate EMI suppression cores (I like the #31
mix from Fair-Rite, available in a variety of forms from Mouser and
Digikey, among others) so that you can deal with the inevitable RFI issues.