For those with a friend in the council or the money needed. This will get you serious bang for your buck. It is still not as big as a 44 metre tower. The efficiency is close to 91% when setup right however!

I'd recommend setting this up if you have the space and the means (even if you think it's not worth it for a 50 watt service). If you have the room, a council that is on side - do it! Your 50 watts will get out much better for it!

This design should handle 400 watts power easily when you use the thicker stranded galvanised fencing wire. There are no coils used in this design and therefore no power lost in loading coils etc. Using the thickest cable one can find for the horizontal wire is the smart thing with this design and governs the total power handling greatly. As I understand it there is a lot of current flowing in the horizontal wire.

The "old school wisdom" at work in this design is to "encourage" maximum current flow in the vertical wire. To do this the horizontal wire has to have hi current in it. It's job is to behaving like a top hat and do the same job as a loading coil without all the bad stuff a real coil brings. Some like to think it sets up the "infinite mirror effect" between itself and the ground (stick two mirrors facing each other you will get the idea). I'm not sure I agree totally with that idea. The design is still a vertically polarised aerial and this is what MF NAS needs for max ground wave coverage.

Some people might have seen pictures of the old pirate radio ships in the UK. This was used by Radio Caroline after their large mast broke. Keen observers will also be aware that their "T" was made from several parallel wires. There are plans to make the Tweaker Stick 3 the same way. This isn't hard and all it takes is more wire and some form of plastic for spacers. The actual aerial wires will look like old TV ribbon but larger. Hams or old techs will know of the old open wire ladder line. This trick makes the aerial wires look like one big piece of wire. It assists in power handling and broadening the bandwidth. Broadening the bandwidth helps with audio response and a point over looked too much in short aerials.

Don't be put off by this design it's actually fairly easy. You could substitute one of the towers for a tree or even both. The height above ground is critical part it is key to the expected performance of this design. The vertical height is close to the magic 1/8 wave rule. Dropping the vertical height of this design is not preferred. The horizontal part can be changed without effecting the performance greatly. For example the dimensions listed are for 1629khz. These dimensions will result in a feed point impedance very close to 50 ohms if it's got an average to good ground. You might not even need any matching at all for 50 ohm feeder. That's even better!