That 44dB down from S9+20 is still well above the noise floor :-)

I've made contacts with all sorts of random pieces of conductor too.
First stealth apartment antenna was a copper tape stick-on fed against
the balcony rail.

I much prefer 100 feet of magnet wire in the clear.

To that I very much prefer what my parents let me put up in the yard
when I was in high school and college: 28 foot tube tower with an A3S,
full wave rotatable loop for 17, 2el yagi for 12, 1/4 wave groundplane
(full size) for 40, sloping dipole for 30 and an 80m inverted vee.

So far I've not used an actual rain gutter or downspout, but I did
model one downspout into my shortened vertical dipole design on 40...
it's not an *intentional* part of the antenna :-)

I think it's great to get on the air with whatever you can. My goal is
to optimize my ability to radiate a signal given the limitations of my
site, and modeling and tweaking is a big part of that. I'm trying to
DX from an apartment complex though, so a handful of dB here and there
really matter.

I didn't quite get the invisible 5 element 20m monobander up to work
VU4 tho ;-)

73,
Dan
N3OX
www.n3ox.net