Has it really been so long since my last post? Yea it has!
Seems that like so many others, I have not had a lot of new things to add here. My palm tree vertical still working OK. I would like to add some matching tuning to the base, but I am too cheep to buy a remote or auto-tuner to do the job right. SO perhaps an UNUN? Some say a 9:1 or 4:1 would be right and would help decrease my feed-line loss (50 feet of low loss coax.)  The problem is that it now works well enough on 40, 10 and 20  meters for the occasional QSO and in general I seem to have 10 minutes here and there to listen and less time to actually operate. As my (now 4 years old) gets older, In some ways the workload goes down, but in others it goes up!.
No progress on my smd bitx20, but I did get my workbench cleaned up. . . . I can do two sided pc boards fairly well now, although I do not try to register anything smaller than about .2 inches, so through the pins dips routing is out. However, it does replace a lot of wire jumpers on my boards.
The HMO police still are not on to me. I am planning a flagpole and Martin house to be up this spring . .. that should help my signal a bit.