I am very very proud that I hung a 80-Meter dipole about 100 feet
above my QTH last week.

But I also had a hankering to cover 40 Meters with it too (although I
already had a 40 Meter dipole). So the section in the antenna book
about fan dipoles came to mind.

I looked in the ARRL antenna book, it told me that the seperation of
wires was not all that important. So I sort-of duplicated one of the
sketches in the book, and hung the 40 meter wire from an tiny little
egg insulator on the 80 meter wire.

Result: DID NOT WORK AT ALL. No indication of any kind of antenna
resonance anywere from 5 to 9 MHz. Sky-high SWR over the whole range.
It didn't mess up 80-meter operation, though.

Looked at W4RNL's "My Top 5 Backyard Multi-Band Antennas". The fan
dipole is in there, but not in the way it looked in the ARRL book. He
says you need a big spacer at the end of the line, like 10 feet, to
get consistent results. He has some other notes about modeling Fan
dipoles at http://www.antennex.com/w4rnl/col0507/amod111.html I give
it a shot, and holy moly, it looks like this should work. Maybe some
bigger spacing would result in a bit more bandwidth but I'm mostly
working at the bottom of the CW band.

So I'm going to find some skinny 10-foot fiberglass poles and try re-
rigging this weekend.

Tim N3QE