My experience with antenna restrictions
Apartment Life
Antenna restrictions prevent me from having any sort of outdoor antenna. After 6 years off the air I came up an indoor antenna that got me back on the HF bands.
Hope this site helps others in my position.
Note: The views and opinions expressed here are just that. I am no expert with antennas but I do have a good working knowledge of the basics. I have installed beams, and verticals, built the basic G5RV now and then. My first antenna was a make shift fan dipole with multiple band elements. From there I graduated to various verticals and wire antennas. I have never owned a tower or a beam.
In 2001 I lost my home in a divorce and moved into an apartment. I was lost when it came to HF operation. There was no way I could "get away" with an outdoor antenna. I was lucky 27 years ago. When I chose that apartment I made sure that it was in a building that backed up to the woods and ever-wild and that it was on the first floor. It was late in the summer and the lawn was through growing for the season. I used that opportunity to sneak a length of RG-58 coax out the window leading to the woods. I figured with the long winters we have here in NY that the coax would relax and disappear into the grass by spring. I took the business end into the woods and found a knoll which had two good support trees near by. First priority was getting on the air so I made up a quick 40 meter dipole. It really wasn't too high, in fact the feed point was at the top of the knoll and only at about 7 feet off the ground. The terrain dropped right off though and by the time the ends reached their supporting trees its height was about 15 feet. After trimming and pruning I had a usable 40 meter antenna with no matching network required. I had great success with that antenna as a Novice and I don't believe the management ever even knew. If at all possible, get your antenna out in the open.
This apartment is a different story. I am right in the middle of the complex on the second floor within view of the office. I am also surrounded with nothing but windows from the other buildings so anything I do would be in plain sight. I tried putting up a dipole for 15 meters in the spare room but it didn't work well, probably because I was using the radios internal tuner. I had so much RFI that the touch-sense lamp followed every CW character I sent. That wasn't going to work so I packed the radio up and gave up on the idea of operating HF. I did leave the antenna up as a short wave receiving antenna.
Christmas day of 2006 I found myself tuning around on a short wave radio and I checked 40 meters CW. There was some kind of contest going on and I had to try again. I dug my rig out of storage and this time I used my versa tuner. I removed the balun at the antenna and replaced it with a section of ladder line long enough to go from the tuner on a stand, to the wire at the ceiling. I pre-tuned the tuner using my SWR analyzer for the center of the 40 meter CW band and then I ran coax to the kitchen table where the rig was set up. It was the Canada Day CW contest and I had a blast. See information about my current installation.
Well here it is 2009 and I have finally submitted my application for my first DXCC award. I never spent a lot of time QSL'ing prior to now and I found that many of the DX contacts I had prior to 2000 were no longer any good. I sent QSL cards and requests to almost all and unfortunately they didn't maintain logs back that far. I received many "not in the log" or "no logs back that far" responses. Best advice is if you worked them and you need them, QSL them!
