The wife was having a girl's day out with her sister & our oldest daughter, so I was left to my own devices (not always a good thing ...).
Just for fun, I decided to see if a 10m cage dipole would show a low SWR across the whole band. I had a spool of 17 awg aluminum fence wire lying around & some old corrugated drain pipe, so the raw materials were at hand.
The drain pipe was used for the spacers, just cut between the ribs & drill holes through the rib sides for the wire. I used six wires on each side.
Feed point & pull point tabs where fabbed from a 3/8" thick cutting board that has been source material for quite a few builds...
Wire was pulled tight in bundles, measured & cut then threaded through the ring spacers. The whole assembly pulled tight, measured & adjusted as needed. I pulled it up with some pull lines left un-used except for hoisting test antenna, attaching RG8x to an outside coax connection. Just connecting direct to coax.
The camera angle show a corner of the 294' horizontal delta in the background.
Testing showed it a bit long, so did an initial trim & added a 1:1 current balun to the feed point. Once it was up, it hadn't shifted enough, so I did one more trim & checked again. The end result:
(the shaded band area on the chart runs from 28.000 to 29.700)
I don't think it will out perform either of the two horizontal loops (550' & 294' delta), but no tuning is necessary prior to use...
I probably won't leave this up for any great period of time, just enough to play with it a bit.
Nick