My approach to wire antennas has been pragmatic since, as a 13-year-old novice, I tried to load up an 80 meter dipole fed with TV twin lead connected to an unbalanced tank circuit.
I now have an 80-meter doublet fed with open wire line. A 4:1 balun sits outside the shack wall - I had it inside the shack but experienced troubles with RF-modulated audio in my Kenwood MC-60 mic.
Before K3 I used a 756ProII. Its tuner could not match the antenna very well. I therefore had to use an MFJ tuner with balun. Its settings were not predictable - a short frequency excursion often required retuning. I knew the K3 tuner would work because of experience with K2s.
I get low SWR at the input to the KAT3 on all bands through 6 meters. I do not know how well the setup works above 15 meters due to lack of activity. It's great on 20 and 17 meters. A little touchy on 40 (second harmonic) but good performance. Lovely on 75 phone - except it picks up too much static(!) My tribander sits unassembled in the garage. I am working on rotating the property for directional control(!!)
My point - an amateur can get good results with wire antennas. Maybe not the best, but good. They are cheap and fairly sturdy. Use stranded wire. If open-wire fed they can work on many bands when impedance is transformed from balanced to unbalanced and a good tuner is used.
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