10m 9:1 End fed Vertical
I was looking for an easy to setup antenna when I ran across the Rybakov 806 Vertical. See the article, revisiting the Rybakov 806, A simple vertical with a 4:1 balun that can typically work 40M-6M with a tuner ( a slightly longer radiating wire and you can get it to tune on 80M.
I had acquired a jackite Pole that I was using to hold a twin lead J-Pole for portable VHF/UHF work. I tried running a wire up the length of it for HF but hadn’t learned about baluns/ununs at that point and had disappointing results.. I also thought the separate wire was a pain portable. I had read articles about copper tape antennas for apartment dwellers and HOA people. So I acquired some copper tape from Amazon, disassembled my pole and tran tape of each section wrapping it around so when I extended the pole I had continuity between sections. I then put a 9:1 unun at the base. I’ve used this successfully in numerous portable operations and a couple of POTA, Parks On The Air, activations
DX Commander Classic
I found Callum McCormick M0MCX by youtube recommendations. He is a gregarious and entertaining fellow that speaks a lot about antenna theory and design.
Some of his first videos I viewed were about the design/modeling software called MMana-Gal Basic. I had tried some of the other modeling software before but struggled with what went where. In a matter of about 15 minutes he had shown his viewers how to model a dipole and view the far field plots.
Somewhere along the way he took the concept of a fan dipole and turned it on end. That is, he bent it at the feed point leaving him with a bunch of 1/4 resonant elements over a ground plane. He added a few bits and pieces by way of spreader disks and a 10M fiberglass pole and then someone or something convinced him to kit this up and start selling it.