50 foot is a neat length in that if you plot all the impedances at the
various bands you fill find a current max fairly close to 50 feet.

Cutting the length may move you closer to a match on some frequencies and
further away, and beyond the range of your tuner on others. I am not
familiar with the specs of your tuner so can not be more definitive.

All this being said, cut it, if your tuner matches it your golden. If not
reattach the cut section.

Take a look at Cecil's site, he has an antenna that he tunes via feedline
length. He has a number of graphs and a smith chart that will answer your
questions.
http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp/notuner.htm

"Pat Whelton" wrote in message
k.net...
I've had a store bought (so sue me) dipole fed with 600 ohm ladder line up
35 feet for about a year and a half now and I love this antenna. It's 66
feet in length and I can pretty much tune everything from 40 through 10
meters with a Dentron Super Tuner. This thing came with 50 feet of ladder
line and I have it draped all over the place trying to take up the slack
before it finally feeds into the shack.

My question is can I safely cut some of this excess ladder line off? I
assume that it will impact the tuning but I'm also assuming the tuner will
take care of it. I guess I can always cut it off and if it doesn't work I
can wire nut it back together again. It just looks sloppy with all this
extra feed line drooping off the roof and suspended by the fence (and over
to grandma's house we go) before it finally comes into the shack.

Your thoughts are appreciated.