[600MRG] hi-FER's and Tree-Tenna on Transmit

[Andy - KU4XR]

Greetings all:

I've been quiet on the list for a while.. My family was displaced from our home from 
Feb. 16th till Mar. 16th due to the winter storm damage.. It was quiet the experience..
I have a lot less trees around here now, and a great many of them are in my yard..
Fortunately, my home was spared from damage except some burst water line outside..
After coming home, I desperately hoped that my LF powerline noise would be greatly
reduced, or maybe go away, due to the power company having to replace untold numbers
of broken power poles.. That wasn't the case however.. Now the noise in worse than ever..
on 185 KHz; it is a relentless 30dB over S-9.. The lower I go, the worse it gets..
The noise is not as destructive on 630 meters, so I have been able to get fair copy of
the WSPR stations this spring, albeit at noticably reduced levels due to propagation...

On Wed. the 15th, I spent the day watching 13,555.450 MHz.. The only hiFER I saw
was " SIW " slant mode.. I used the Tree-Tenna for reception, and it does not do well
above MF range.. " SIW " was seeable thru-out the day, but nothing else.. Audibly, 
there was a non-stop " kachunk-kachunk-kachunk " sound.. Quiet annoying, and I have
no idea what is was..

After dark, I tried looking for MEPT QRSS on 40 meters, to no avail. Then tried 
80 meters.. nothing seen there either.. I migrated to 160 meters to give WSPR a try
and was at least rewarded with results... and not too shabby either.. 121 spots on
receive from the limited amount of stations on the air.. Best DX was 661 miles..
Then curiousity got to me... Could I possibly " load up " the twin Hickory Nut trees,
and radiate any signal from them ??? To my surprise; Yes !! The results on transmit
were abundantly under-whelming.. But to even be able to pull that off was exciting..
I do not have a tuner for 160 meters, so all I could do was insert different values
of capacitance in series with the feed wire, and watch the rigs SWR, and power meter..
Lowest SWR point was with .005 µF in series - 1.3 on the meter.., I connected a
couple of Air Variables to ground on each side of the series capacitor, and careful
tuning brought the SWR to 1.0 with 5 watts exciting the wire.. The setup produced
only 2 spots, but, I have never tried transmitting on a tree before, so to get " any "
results at all was an accomplishment :

2015-04-16 03:56  KU4XR 	 1.838090 	 -28 	 EM75xr  +37  	K9AN EN50wc  375 
2015-04-16 02:14  KU4XR 	 1.838090 	 -28 	 EM75xr  +37  	K9AN EN50wc  375

I ran all night, but no more decodes from anyone.. The GEO activity was quite high
last night, staying mostly at K-5, so that in itself had some kind of effect, I just
don't know whether it was beneficial, or detrimental.. I plan to try this again as 
weather allows, and under better K levels to see what comes of it...

Thanks for reading this, and I hope that at the least you found it amusing, and got a
chuckle out of it...

73 to all:

Andy - KU4XR , Friendsville, TN. EM75xr