Check first on a smith chart whether transmission line that you can easily make or get and adjust its length has proper impedance for both source and antenna. The shorter length matching section has, the wider bandwidth you’ll get. There are typically two solutions, of which one is better. Ideally you’d like to have transmission line impedance a bit lower than what would be needed if only transmission line part was used (without stub)

If you want to make a yagi, or mount antenna close to a mast and don’t care particularly hard about extremely uniform coverage, you can modify impedance by changing distance to reflector. If you want to use something like this https://www.wa5vjb.com/yagi-pdf/cheapyagi.pdf then this antenna (radiating element) is already unbalanced and doesn’t need balun that badly

I don’t know if you need common current mode choke like this, it’s probably overkill, popping 3-4 ferrite beads on normal sized coax should be enough. Some people don’t even use it at all and things still work for them. You can also always use folded balun or sleeve balun as a common mode current choke. This toroid is only 20mm in diameter or so, and RG174 has minimum bending radius 6mm, so it’s abused a bit but not that much. It’s probably good for lower bands like 6m too. Alternative is to use a pair of twisted wire in parallel (these have 100 ohm impedance or so, two in parallel are closer to 50) wound on ferrite (more common on HF), and if size restrictions exist, you can use tall and narrow non-split ferrite bead instead of wide and short toroid like this one i’ve used. Also i made it this way because that’s what i had in my drawer. Maybe it was not balun that was narrowband, but radiating element is a limitation instead?

that’s RG174, there’s only 25cm of it or so, so loss is probably not a huge concern (53dB/100m at 400MHz, so 0.13dB), and that common mode choke is probably a bit too much anyway

not much? i don’t have scale but 150g perhaps? i think that if you don’t need it waterproof then you can just extend wires, use them for support and get rid of case entirely. this would require sturdier shorting bar and some spacers probably but would be more compact

it’s 80cm long and can’t be folded, so if that’s portable enough for you, then yes

the point of this antenna is that it has something about 2-3dB gain over dipole, if you don’t need this a lots of smaller antennas with dipole gain exist

e: and also despite what its size could suggest it’s a single band antenna, this one is for 70cm but if you have space for 2m (2.3m long) then i think it still should be practical

antenna making is art of tradeoffs. there are different ones between size, cost, weight, mechanical and electrical complexity, wideband performance, radiation pattern, efficiency, and use of harmonics if any.

for VHF and up, it only makes sense to make single band antennas because cost and size savings are tiny otherwise, but bandwidths are large and there are no reasonable autotuners. there are special cases such as 2m/70cm antennas that can do both, but that’s it. this is area of simple or folded dipoles, halos, yagis, LPDAs, helical antennas, and in bigger end of scale antenna arrays and optical-like systems like parabolic reflectors

for HF, if you have budget and real estate for it, some of best antennas money can buy would be LPDA for entire range you’re interested in. this thing, however, for 3-30MHz range would be a giant aluminum triangle 40m wide, 50m long, weights well over a ton and needs mast and rotator because it’s directional, not to mention that it costs fortune. but on balance it can reject noise from wrong directions and is always matched

some typical approaches are as follows:

1. single band wire antennas. these would be halfwave dipoles in any shape (straight, inverted-v, slopers, off-center and so on), j-poles, groundplane antennas, quarterwave dipoles (requires good ground) and couple other variations. these are light, cheap, efficient, fit entire single band without gross abuse of finals, have uniform radiation pattern. but only on one band, and having multiple of them in proximity can lead to weird effects, so these are best if you’re hiking for example, but good in general

2. principally single band wire antennas but now we also want to squeeze some other bands out of it. these are dipoles - normal or OCFDs, full wave loops in one approach and trapped dipoles in other. in first case, we exploit the fact that there are usable harmonics on some bands - 80m has 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m. 40m has 20m, 15m and 10m. 20m has 10m. but depending on type not all are always usable and higher harmonics will have narrowed usable band compared to single band case. in trapped dipole approach there’s a limit on how many traps you can put (mitigated to some degree if you make it asymmetric and put traps on one side only), and as traps work as coils, these shorten antenna which also narrows usable bandwidth but now for lower bands, opposite of the former. use of autotuner and low loss transmission line can make it work over wider bandwidth, but this only goes so far. note that some bands are narrower than others (12m, 17m, 30m, 60m) and it can be made to work for these pretty well, but less so for others (80m, 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m), but it can still work if there’s less bands on one antenna, especially if you’re not interested in entire band (like for CW-only or voice-only operators), are willing to accept some loss of power, or use tuner, or combination of some of these

3. antennas that are by themselves not resonant at all. these are either lossy (like terminated dipole) or require tuner, sometimes purpose-built and can be narrowband when tuned (doublets, magloops) both can be reasonably compact. because match lies in tuner, these are multiband by virtue of changing tuner settings. terminated antennas have good match but also you can be dumping half of power or more in resistor. there are also ways to use mast antennas in this way, even if they are grounded (using gamma-match for example)

4. antennas that have to be extensively electrically shortened because wavelength is huge. these are generally everything from 160m down. these are things like magloops and bespoke wire antennas with loading coils and capacitive hats and such. because these are short in comparison to wavelength, efficiency is small and bandwidth is tiny (but can fill entire band) but also require extensive space just due to how huge wavelength is

5. some directivity can be achieved by making yagis (higher part of HF) or by deploying multiple antennas in an array. depending on band and type of antennas this can get very elaborate and expensive. simplest and cheapest way uses multiple radiating halfwave elements connected by coils, or with parallel parasitic elements. this can get decently directional while also being a bit compact but also this makes it more narrowband and due to large size only makes sense for higher HF and VHF

but start simple. single band wire dipole or j-pole would be probably best in your situation

you might have problems with your EFHW balun being too lossy/undersized. check if ferrite heats up when transmitting

you’re looking for 2 or 3, possibly more, separate antennas. consider: a groundplane, sleeve dipole, copper cactus, halo antenna or small yagi (2-3 el) for 2m; you might get away with operating them on temporary stand, or even from inside apartment. groundplane for 10m (can be made from wire; 10m is wide and you want separate, single band dipole for this reason); and some kind of wire antenna for 20m, maybe also for 10m. depending on conditions one or another might be better (vertical vs horizontal polarization, height above ground etc).

one way to make the latter is OCFD, this way you can make antenna for both 10m and 20m; for this one you’d need some matching scheme based on specific feedpoint position, specific coax lengths (5m is halfwave at 10m so won’t change impedance at this band, but can be used to match 20m) or 1:4 or some other balun. see there for more info you can also try a full-wave loop for 20m if you have enough space, it’ll work for 10m as well. same applies for matching, that is, if you don’t have autotuner (but where’s fun in that?). you can even make single band j-poles from ladder line/window line and wire even for 20m band, and string them from your window all the way to tree on the far end. you might want to put a pulley on a tree for that, and all antennas can this way be rolled and fit in your backpack, or maybe even pocket

these commercial antennas are expensive, you can have another radio for this kind of money

now that i’m thinking, you can make loop antenna with circular polarization and mesh reflector with closer spacing that would be even more compact and that would have more of one sided donut shaped radiation pattern, which would be probably more suitable for your application, but it’s guaranteed to have different impedance and so would require simulation

wait, do you want to use it at 140-ish MHz? these antennas will be quite sizable no matter what you do. you can make cross-dipole yagi but with loops instead of straight elements to make it a bit more compact. again, one director will be fine, hell you can even skip it too and just use driven element + reflector. take reflector + driven element from there https://www.robkalmeijer.nl/techniek/electronica/radiotechniek/hambladen/qst/1990/01/page24/index.html and first director from there https://www.iw5edi.com/ham-radio/2425/directional-antennas-cubical-quad this will get you antenna looking roughly like 60x60x70cm box, 60x60x40cm for two-element version. you can get away with using ferrite beads instead of these bespoke sleeve baluns, it’s done this way because it’s made for high power. i don’t think you can get much more compact. you will have to resize it for your frequency. closest band is 144MHz

really you can use any calculator for cubical quad yagi like this one https://www.qsl.net/yt1vp/CUBICAL QUAD ANTENNA CALCULATOR.htm, just with this modification that instead of one feed you need two feeds geometrically 90 degrees apart, that are electrically also 90 degrees apart. this means you can use feed system like this one for 435MHz:

just scaled up for your frequency. also replace these sleeve baluns with a couple of ferrite beads and you’re good to go. mechanically, you can make elements from thick copper wire and you can make it all hold up partially on tension of that wire. remember to factor in velocity factors of your cables

wood is fine but make sure to waterproof it if used outside. use as little as practical, performance can change with weather unlike with plastic. no metal fasteners either as this will have weird effects

do you want it to be compact when deployed or compact when stored? you can also make crossed dipole yagi, you probably want it to be rather nondirectional so one director, driven element and reflector would be fine. that antenna is much longer but i think you get the idea https://www.qsl.net/dk7zb/Cross-Yagi/crossyagi.htm you can also make bifiliar helical antenna but this one again gets a bit directional. you can probably make it shorter than these 5 turns and change pitch too to decrease directionality https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/content/techdigest/pdf/V12-N01/12-01-Stilwell.pdf you can also make unifilar helical antenna but it needs a big reflector baseplate so it won’t be as compact, it looks like this https://www.ab9il.net/wlan-projects/wifi3A.html

If you don’t live in complete wilderness and especially if you are in repeater range then yes, there’s a lot of use of 2m/70cm. There are even commercial duobanders for this, but you can also make your own

Lots of things change between HF and VHF. Matching methods, baluns, and materials are completely different. You can get away with 70cm band antenna made of 8mm aluminum tube, and it’ll get you some reasonable bandwidth just because of how wide it is, but if you want to scale it up to 20m it’s suddenly over 20cm wide. This is not practical anymore, but you also don’t need bandwidth like this. HF antennas (other than masts) are mostly made of wires and rely on things other than thickness to make them wideband enough. If you want to use monopole, on VHF/UHF you can use metallic roof as a groundplane. On HF you’ll need to use actual ground with network of wires, which is lossy. For dipoles, distance to ground will be many wl long on UHF, and it’ll work mostly like in free space, but on HF this changes impedance, losses and radiation pattern. On HF, polarization is scrambled after reflection from ionosphere, on UHF it just goes through

Now we have excellent space weather so you can make long range contacts on 10m, but don’t expect it to last. More typical HF bands are 20m, 40m and for these space becomes a constraint. Then you have to pick two out of three: small, efficient, broadband

What bands are we talking about (HF or 2m/70cm?)

Solar panels, specifically inverter is likely to generate a lot of noise

there’s 4265 torrents right now with 1000 pdfs per torrent. 120TB ish as of three years ago

you don’t know where’s what, because torrents are packaged by submission date and not by topic

you can download entire libgen archive if you are so inclined, there’s even torrents list https://libgen.rs/repository_torrent/

apparently this happens https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/cs9j02/users_who_charge_to_access_their_files/

i think that it’s mostly because they don’t want somebody with 0 shared files to download - and i sorta understand that, would be lot cooler if people weren’t leeches only, sure, but i can’t be bothered to check or enforce. if you have something shared and message them they’ll usually allow to download

Preferences -> Searches -> toggle Show privately shared files in search results

you can hide private files in search results, at least in nicotine