I have a difficult location for building aerials - I’m at the bottom of a 4 storey building, and my garden faces a public park with a pathway running right alongside my boundary fence making them a tempting target for passing kids. I’m also almost directly below the communal TV aerial.

To cut a long and boring story short, I decided the best option (for now) was a rotary dipole for 80m - and it needed to be discrete if it was to avoid complaints.

And withstand ‘very’ high winds on a regular basis.

The ingredients:

3 sections of 5 foot swaged alloy pole
1 tee-piece from Sandpiper
2 80m mobile whips bought on ebay
black silk spray-paint
lots of cable as the ’shack’ is now upstairs.

All in all quite a decent result - barely visible from all but one angle, until you get right up close - given the much higher contrast of the stairwell it would be a very unreasonable person indeed to whine about that aerial

The balun is simply about 18-20 feet or so of the coax close wound on a slice of cola-bottle and secured with gaffa-tape, then tied to the mast with cable-ties.

How well does it work?

On 80 it’s got a bandwidth of about 40khz without using the atu, and can still reach the USA at a readable strength despite being only 16 feet wide. The high-angle radiation that was missing from it’s predecessor makes inter-G contacts much easier.

It loads up quite happily for both 40 and 20 - I haven’t tried it anyplace else yet - and performs a lot better than I expected it to given the loading-coils.

I’m happy to call this experiment a success.

Sources:

Tee-piece from http://www.sandpiperaerials.co.uk/ (£5 plus postage)

80m whips from eBay seller chalesantennaman (about £11 each)

Sectional mast from http://www.haydon.info/
(I bought some rejects - 3 20 foot sets of 2″ mast for £49 plus carriage)