Greetings and hello, hope all is well. Since I built the 40-80m Fan dipole antenna I have been much more active on the 80m band, this antenna with its 1:1 balun has been receiving many excellent signal reports from both short and long skip local and DX. 

The SOTA wire is an excellent radiator and combined with a 1:1, 50 ohm balun which I bought  a Diamond BU-50 rated to 1200 watts seems really good despite its small physical size, it appears to be working very well so far with 400 watts. I am pleased to report it has not shown any problems or issues over the winter months where we have had lots of snow and ice. The homebrew 40-80M FAN DIPOLE, YES! I would definitely recommend. Also, I recommend fitting a balun to any dipole made for HF as it does help to prevent unwanted RF return and reception interference that is often picked up on the feed line. Since I fitted the balun, I have noticed a positive difference whilst using it. The dipole seems to be a very good performer all round on the 80m band and I have been hitting North and South America as well as Asiatic Russia and North Africa up on the DX portion of the band over the winter months as well as booming up and down the UK and across to EU. This winter has been really good on 80m since I built the 40-80 Fan Dipole, much better than my previous antenna set ups. I am glad I went to the effort, well worth it and it was easy and inexpensive. Have a look at the homebrew 40-80 fan dipole video if you want to see how I made it with all of the dimensions. Its on my YT channel or further down the blog posts.

I hope to hear you later maybe on the 80m band during my Sunday night live check in, on my ham radio YouTube channel from around about 22.00 utc (10pm Local). It wont be long before 20m is back in full swing each evening and the DX will be plentiful so I best get on 80m a few more times  before hand and work a few more amazing stations. Thank You for all of the Calls, keep them coming in!  73.