I have a 20/30/40 trapped EFHW from hamshop.cz ought years ago at Friedrichshafen when I happened to have a bag of Czech Crowns from a recent business trip to Prague. Normally I make antennas and don’t buy them but I had the cash so why not. I use it rather a lot now but I dumped the match unit and use either an AA5TB tunable match or a fixed 1:49 or 1:64 match and the KX2 ATU. Anyway I decided to make a backup because only having one you use a lot makes me insecure!
Having made it I had such confidence I didn’t test it but took it with up Scald Law, my local SOTA hill that involves a wee bit of exercise. 35mins drive to the parking place. Boots on and across the hard frozen ground, 1C according to the car but lots of ice, frost and snow higher up. Into IronMan mode and I was at the top in 46mins. Not bad as there were some real icy patches.
The wind was a bit cold and it was probably -2C at the top and well below -5C with the windchill. Down onto the steep sloping North side, it’s steep but covered in heather so it is easy to walk on even with 4-8 cm of snow. I was emptying my bag when I took out my Hagloffs Barrier jacket in its stuff sack. Really light and windproof and warm, 380 g and packs into 24 cm x 14cm tube. They’re not cheap, £220 is the list proce but I got mine in a sale. I dropped it and it bounced and rolled and bounced and rolled and the b@st@rd thing accelerated down the steeper than 1:1 slope. It started off just a bit faster than I felt safe trying to descend the hill and then got faster.
“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” 
OK it was gone. So as I was out of the wind I decided it’s just past midday, we’ll play with the new antenna till 1300Z then pack up and descend looking for the coat. There’s a path up from Logan Lea and the reservoir to the summit, so it would be down the steep slope to find the coat then contour round the path an up. Bu**er.
Anyway, the antenna. I saw a reel of Belden wire at a rally for pennies and bought… “I’ll find a use for that one day”. It is 0.85 mm OD, Teflon covered with 6* 0.25 mm Silver plated conductors. Is this too thin for an antenna? Let’s make one and find out! I bought two Pico traps from Sotabeams for 20m and 30m, wound them and tweaked for resonance using the old MFJ259b. I measured the hamshop.cz lengths and made a copy.
Will it work? Err yes! But being black wire < 1 mm diameter you cannot see it against a grey cloudy sky or blue sky. So it needs some warning streamers adding. Anyway measured as an inverted seven it reads the following SWR with the 1:49 match
40m 3.3:1 ???
30m 1.7:1
20m 1.7:1
17m 3.3:1
15m 2.7 :1
12m 2.6:1
10m 3.7:1
A tweak will make the 20/30 values go under 1.5 and that will do nicely. Something not quite right for 40m. Of course the KX2 ATU just laughed at having to tune such low values.
So that was the positive stuff. Does it work well 40 sounded different and quiet but I started on 30m CW. 16 QSOs: ON, EA2, G, GW, OH, GM, HB9, DL with OH3GZ being ODX. Again lots and lots of G/GM/GW stations worked at around 350km which is short for 30m. Then 15m CW and 14 QSOs: EA2, EA8, S5, LY, EA7, OK, SV, W4, EA1, DL. I’m not sure who was ODX just now either EC8ADS, W4GO or W4JKC. I had a quick bash on 10m and worked E72U. Turns out SFI was 174 but K was 4 and A was 23. Not brilliant conditions.
EDIT: W4 will be about 6000 km and EA8 is 3300 km.
Then it was 1300Z, so pack up time and at 1310 I started down the damned steep snow covered slopes. There a few places where there is no heather, just stones about the size of a fist that are dodgy to walk on when it’s dry, when it’s frozen and there’s ice, no way. I snaked down and then what’s that, yes my coat sat in a depression. Into the bag, out with a celebration KitKat and then do I contour round or be a man and go straight up. Straight up won! It took 25mins to descend then reascend back to the trig. It’s 1640Z and still very light here but I am about to go and find the Whisky 
A £200 jacket is too much to write-off. What annoys me is I have various bags that hold stuff when activating that are attached to the big rucksack so they cannot blow away. I never considered being Billy Butterfingers and dropping something and it rolling down the hill. As I was operating on a slope I made sure the KX2 was well and truly attached to the ground so it couldn’t fall away.
Well a bit more exercise than expected but all’s well that ends well.
