KA2DEW - 75m dipole pulled from my trunk.

I needed to check into a net run out of NC from NJ, on 3960khz (75m) at 9pm local time. About 450 miles. I made a dipole that was 118 feet long, balun fed.

I tied rope to a water bottle and tossed it over a tree limb. Then I looped the water bottle over a low limb a few times. On the other side the bottle seemed to be enough. The tree limbs were flexible and springy where the rope went over so I could pull the rope down and tie up the dipole and then let the rope spring back up. At that point the balun is laying in the middle of the parking lot with about 20' extra wire slack. I walked the dipole north until the wire was taught and then used a long bungie cord to clip the balun to a luggage ring in my trunk. The antenna was slightly V shaped pointing south. Then I ran the coax to the radio and got on the air.

Very low noise floor, S1 or less except for a few stations several Khz down the band. 1.2:1 SWR even though the antenna was only a couple of feet from the ground in the middle.

N3LTV was net control and I could easily talk to him. 10 over S9 signals for most of the time, dipping down to S8 or so with band changes. I could hear all of the stations in the net who were in NC. Some of those had noise that was too strong for them to receive me.