Friend of mine Jaun Ricco made me this nifty little bracket last night for my new vertical antenna. This will keep me from having to employee the kiddos when making minor adjustments to the antenna.

I picked up a new antenna over the weekend. The Hy-gain AV14AVQ  It was a bit pricey for what it was, but the R&D was already done and parts sourced. So all I had to do was assemble. 10,15,20 are flat, but 40 is at 2, which isn't bad but still has room for improvement. I'm going to fab a fold-over mount to make the adjustments easier. There is marginal gains from it compared to the inverted V dipole. Not enough to justify the price. However the limited height keeps it out of reach of my weather neck and power transmission lines no matter how it could get knocked over. So that makes it worth it. I'll call BS on the ability to withstand 80mph winds. Not in this universe. If you get one you will want guy ropes. I'm going to 3D print some bushings to fill the lower part of the bells to stabilize it. Then maybe it could with stand 80mph winds, but still going to have guy ropes. I might be stupid, but not retarded.

Addendum: I will post the 3D files on thingaverse when I design them. Under the username Trencher42

By the image you would think this would be cut and dry. Nothing of the sort. This had to be the unweildy antenna I have ever built. It's own weight bends it like a horseshoe.

Automatic SSB selection upon band change. You want to turn this dude off if you plan on doing digital. As of this post HRD doesn't support the DX-SR8 or DX-SR9 below 10MHz even though it says it does. This stems from a missing leading zero in the frequency set function. I thought DX Labs Commander was flakey too because it would jump to LSB on frequency changes. I was almost done with making a rig file for OmniRig when I started to have the same problem. After a little searching I found this wonderful feature that is defaulted on. This is something that should have been defaulted off for sure.