Ground-Mounting the Tarheel Screwdriver

I have finally dispatched the tripod! The Tarheel is now mounted at ground level on a 10 ft. galvanized pipe driven about 8 feet into the ground (thankfully the ground is sand...). So now the radials extend horizontally rather than drooping down 3 or 4 feet like before. My SWR on 80m and 10m is still way out of whack -- the antenna will not tune under 1.5:1 below 5 MHz or above 26 MHz or so -- but 40m up to 12m I can tune it to 1.2:1 or better.

There was some very bad RFI on 17m the other day, getting into the upstairs stereo so loud that I could here it downstairs in the shack. This has been greatly improved, and I'm still operating without any sort of RF ground system and only 8 radials @ 9 ft. each. The next items on my To Do list are to increase the number of radials, hopefully longer than 9 ft., and to install some ground rods at each end of the coax to ground the antenna and all the equipment inside.