Well, well... I've been on the go for several weeks and haven't had much time to mess around with the radio's or other things. But, today's the day. ARRL Sweepstakes is next weekend and I need to make sure everything is working. Seth and I made it out this morning and picked up 1000ft of 18ga bare copper stranded wire which we're going to turn into as many 35ft radials as possible for the vertical wire antenna.
The vertical wire has turned into kind of an interesting antenna. It started out as a 1/2 wave 20m vertical. It was decently resonant across the phone section of 20m but required a tuner on any other band. So, I used some extra wire to make a 1/2 wave 40m radiator and using a wooden spreader pulled them both up into the tree. Much the same as a fan dipole, but vertical. To my surprise, it works pretty well now on 20m and 40m (haven't tried it on anything else). It definitely needs more radials as I was short on wire when I first put it up.