And both of the replies above provide good illustration why you want a multi-band antenna, particularly indoors. Propagation favors different bands at different times of the day. And even when the band you used yesterday (e.g. 20M with your dipole) was great into Europe, it may be dead to that location the next day. But guess what? Move up to 15M (for example) and voila! There are the European stations bombing in. But your antenna and tuner aren't able to "go there" with any level of reasonable performance. As you have learned, with a 20M dipole you are pretty much "stuck" on 20 even if the other bands are open. An EFHW or OCFD and appropriate tuner are going to get you where the action is... even if some of that power is frying eggs or welding metal (!) in the tuner. (Hmmm.... howcum those piping hot tuners aren't regarded as safety / fire hazards requiring UL listing, etc?) More likely than losing all your power in the tuner is that your RF pattern may not be the most efficient for whatever the ionospheric conditions are at the time. Sometimes what you need is an NVIS skywave, sometimes a multi-hop ionosphere reflection. But with a single band antenna and limited tuner not capable of handling more than a 3 to 1 match... you're sorta stuck. And all of the above is null and void if there is a solar flare (CME - Coronal Mass Ejection) that "turns off" HF just as if a switch was flipped to "off" on the bands. In that case, don't blame any of your station setup. But most of the time there is something you can do about, "I'm not being heard in (xxx)." The answer is to change bands and retune.
Would an end-fed in this position have a different radiation pattern, or will I have the same problem?
