As often happens around this domicile, some projects go on the back burner for a while. Back on the front burner, so here's a rundown on the current status of this antenna exercise. With possible future minor tweaks, I think I've got things as good as they are going to get, there should not be any more updates barring something of a revolutionary nature popping up. Please excuse the repeating of some of the info, this is a summary type post. Note also that this is a unique installation, as are ALL antennae.
Being a complete ignoramus at the git go, I thought I needed to have a better feel of what was going on with this fuzzy stick. Using the borrowed 259B, I took a set of readings, all at an elevation I could reach readily. As noted, a brain fart told me to swing the antenna and see if horizontal orientation made a difference in SWR readings. It did, which, in retrospect, I should have expected at the gitgo since the setup for testing is pretty close to the house. Seriously glad I farted, or I could have blundered into some sort of problem. In all cases, orientation affected the range of frequencies when my arbitrary "useable range" is defined by a SWR of 2:1 or better. Anyway, at 40M, the initial readings showed an extremely narrow range of useable frequencies centered about 7.125MHz. At 20M, the useable range was in the middle of the band, again orientation dependent. At 15M, the entire range of frequencies met the criteria except on the high end at two orientations. At 10M, it showed a trend toward resonance at way lower frequencies, but nothing useful at all within the band. At 6M, the same tendency as at 10M showed itself. I did not bother with 2M because my xceiver won't do that, and I have 2M (and 70cm) covered with an h/t.
I had to make some sort of decision, to trim and check at all orientations, or pick one direction and trim to suit. Picked one, got out the nippers and had at it. Also, since I have no current interest in CW, I chose to bring resonance up from the lower ends of the bands to where phone is more prevalent. As directed, started with 40M and worked up in frequency, got to as good as I could, and raised the antenna to operating height, and ran another full set of readings at the same orientations as the pretrim readings. I'll tell you what, a quarter of an inch at a time is tedious, even with the meter to work with, there is NO substitute for the time spent.
Results, then.
At 40M, I have moved the defined range to a higher frequency, centered more or less at 7.175MHz, and the auto tuner will likely make the rest of the band (except the extreme high and low ends) useable, but power restricted (as expected.) This is not a condemnation of the Swiss Army knife scheme, it's a reflection of the reality with multi-band antennas, and this one in particular. Here, it's worth the note that the auto tuner in the xceiver will deal with some of that mismatching and broaden the useful range a bit, but NOT to the whole range of freqs in all orientations; at the extreme high and low ends, the SWRs are off scale of the meter and range of the auto tuner. (The xceiver will protect itself by refusing to operate.)
At 20M, the useable range is top to bottom, all except the extreme top and bottom is well within auto tuner range, and the majority will have no power cutbacks. The trimming of the 40M spokes very definitely did affect this, no trimming was done to the 20M spokes.
At 15M, there was no detectable change, good from top to bottom regardless of orientation.
At 10M, major trimming took place, the entire band is now useable without needing to call on the auto tuner, again without considering orientation.
At 6M, I screwed the legs to the minumum length, and for now will accept that for use. It is resonant to less than 2:1 at 50.500, and the rest of the band is within the range of the auto tuner. At some point, I'll hack off a couple inches and see some improvements, but that's back burner, I have a couple more things to do to set up the shack properly (like lightning protection, rf gounding, and a way to get the coax outside without passing it thru an open door or window.)