As advertised and supplied this aerial works 12,17,30 and 60 meters. Not really being too interested in 60M I asked MFJ whether it could be adjusted to work on 40M. An emphatic NO was the answer. Well, they lied. By losing a couple of the capacity hat radial spokes, and carrying out some careful trimming of the others, I found I could get it to work very well on 40 without compromising the other bands. 2:1 bandwidth of 125KHz, which isn't too bad at all considering how short the aerial is relative to quarter wave...

I'm posting this for information, in case anyone else is interested in trying one of these aerials.

Phil
G3UGK

Toy be fair to MFJ, any antenna can be made to work anywhere depending on the level of butchering you're prepared to do. MFJ's response was based on not cutting up the antenna as you have done.

How dare you cut up that antenna Phil, it's not an experimental hobby you know, just open the box, plug it in and play...

Cheers, Dave.

Fair point Conor, but I'd feel much more "friendly" to MFJ if they'd been of any help with getting the thing to work as it should in the first place, before I started butchering. As it simply didn't respond as the user manual said it should, I asked them for help, using their online forms. Twice. In both cases all I got was a telephone number to call. I pointed out that as I was in the UK (which they might have guessed from my callsign) the cost of transatlantic telephone calls made this advice impractible. Needless to say I've heard nothing since. There's an extremely impolite acronym of "MFJ" which refers, unfairly I think, to their products, which I'm not going to repeat here, but which certainly applies to their so-called "customer service". IMHO

Rant over

Phil
G3UGK

I hang my head in shame

Phil
G3UGK

How does it perform?

Give me 5 mins to fire up the linear and choose a frequency?
Time is now 0945
Phil
G3UGK

20 over 9 into my QTH Phil so looks and sounds like it's working fine.

MAny thanks Gerry for coming up and checking it out for me. Very pleasantly surprised how well it seems to be working.
73
Phil
G3UGK
ROA

There you go a bit of tinkering, despite MFJ's lack of help, and in the real world you have made it work where you require it to!
Strange how precious some manufacturers get over their design, at the end of the day its a hobby of taking off the shelf bits, doing a bit of homebrew modification, and seeing what personal improvements we can make!

I suspect it's gone to the dogs now on 60m but as Phil had no intention using the antenna to cover that band it's no big loss.