Or really, it has been up since May 25th. It was a 15 hour job all day on the 25th and that was after several hours of pre-installation work for a few evenings preceding the 25th. Because of ladder height and placement limitations I didn't get the mast quite where I wanted it. I think that will actually work out better in the long run but for this job it meant some longer and more difficult coax runs and changing my grounding scheme.
There is a lot of information on the web that describes ideal lengths for random wires, making them not random at all. These ideal lengths avoid half wave multiples on all the bands of interest. Some of these "ideal" lengths give you only a few feet of wiggle room in order to fall between half wave multiples. It is never mentioned how sensitive these designs are. We never operate at the exact same frequencies over and over again, so what happens when I'm "close" to one of these multiples? My guess is that a window on the order of a few feet is not enough in the real world.
My antenna is something greater than 200' but less than 230' (I think). I haven't used it on all bands but my AT-897 tunes it up from 1.8-50 MHz and all of the MARS frequencies that I have tried. That is exactly what I wanted it to do, whatever it's electrical length is. It is made from 14 AWG coated stranded wire fed about 20' off the ground via a COMTEK 4:1 current balun. The wire then runs to the ENE (60 degrees) for at least 150' coming to within 12' or so of the ground before hitting an insulator 20'+ up a magnolia tree. At that point it takes a hard left turn (a little greater than 90 degrees) and runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 75' sloping downward where it is terminated to an insulator on an oak tree about 12' off the ground. So I have a 200'+ "L" shaped sloping random wire, or something like that.
There was a lot of different information regarding feeding, grounding, and using counterpoises for random wires. Pretty much every resource had different information. Some resources suggested 1:1 current baluns, or 4:1, or even 9:1 or 16:1. Some 1:1 voltage baluns, some ununs of all ratios and some nothing at all. Some recommend a counterpoise or a radial network (with 1/4 wave radials on all bands of interest), others grounding the shield side (but not to the station ground), and again others nothing at all. The information in general agreed but there was no consensus: some sort of good ground or "other half of the antenna" was needed for efficiency I believe, usually some impedance matching was necessary or at least desired, and depending on the installation measures may have to be taken to keep RF out of the shack. Radials or a counterpoise was not going to happen, at least not at this time and not where I have the antenna and mast. Also, that and my shack being on the second floor caused me to have concerns of having RF in the shack. To prevent the RF in the shack issue I chose a 4:1 current balun with the shield side connected directly to a dedicated ground rod (OK, it is shared with the mast) via 6 AWG soild copper wire. If I understand correctly I'm basically directly grounding all unbalanced feed line currents. Not the best for efficiency but it keeps the coax feed line from radiating which keeps RF out of the shack. I almost went with a 1:1 balun and I'm glad that I didn't because I'm close to my tuner's impedance limit on some bands even with the 4:1 balun.
The mast is the Radio Shack coated galvanized type that I had left over from the old QTH VHF/UHF antennas. The only thing I don't like about it is that I have to sand off the coating to expose bare metal for ground connections, something that will have to be a periodic practice to remove the rust that will form and spoil the low impedance ground connection. I used some left over LMR-400 with crimp on/solder connectors as the feed line, this time with a drip loop at the balun. The DX Engineering entrance box is my common entrance point and station RF ground, grounded via 2" wide copper strap to its own ground rod. It is mounted on the outside wall of my shack on the second floor. The coax enters the shack via a coax lightning suppressor mounted on the inside of the box. On the inside wall of the shack I made an inner entrance panel out of a blank 3 gang box cover with 4 SO-239 bulkhead connectors and a ground bus. The ground bus is connected to to outside panel via 1" braided copper strap. My rig is connected to the inner panel via RG-8X coax with a common mode choke. The radio and tuner are grounded to the ground bus via 1/2" braided copper strap.
My next post will summarize my assessment of this antenna's performance. No fancy analysis, which I'm incapable of, just my observations.