Thanks again Simon. The dinky antenna is interesting for mobile use (I sail on other people’s boats, and love hill walking).

My back garden is about 40m long and 6m wide, my house is about 7.5m tall and my front garden is another 6m. For a whole bunch of reasons (including neighbours) I don’t want a tall antenna or supporting mast.

Given my preliminary research, I will definitely be using a dipole. I am interested in digital radio (e.g. FT8 and WSPR) and, from what I have seen, there is a lot of activity on the 80m, 40m, 20m and 10m bands. 1/4 wave dipole for 80m would be 40m in length, right? Worst case, I run several dipoles from the same supports.

The bad news is that I live in North London so I cannot avoid RFI: my noise floor isn’t going to be low. The good news is that digital radio is better able to deal with that.

One of my other passions is space and it seems like using satellites for radio can be done almost anywhere. So I will eventually look into that too!