Hi there Glenn. Nice write-up, we have a lot in common. I used to have cherry, apple, and pear trees here on my 6-acres but eventually over the decades they got too big and with too many ice storms they all lost too many vital branches so all that remain are some ornamental pears here and there. There used to be several family run orchards around here but they closed after the OM's went SK and the kids did not want to keep things running. Very sad ! As far as good Mexican and Chinese restaurants go, the fact I wear elastic pants says it all.I really enjoy playing with antennas esp comparing one against the other at different frequencies for different purposes. I also like to model them, then build them, and finally test them in the real world to see how close they came. It is super scary how the latest NEC tools can nail LF antennas to a tee.
I designed a 600' resonant inv-v antenna for 630m that used a large center loaded inductor then ultimately a gamma match to get a perfect 50 ohm match for the coax back into the shack. No tuning was needed, 1.2:1 SWR and a nice high-Q that gave me 3-4 kHz of useable BW. Perfect for the entire 630m band. The scary part was that EZNEC with the NEC5 engine nailed the required inductance value and out of 600' of wire I only had to trim off 1-2 feet off each side !
I too am retired but from the aerospace (defense) side. I was a NSA certified tempest engineer which is the only thing I did from the time I graduated with my BSEE back near Detroit. As a punk in the motor city me and my equally disturbed & warped brothers would routinely go "alley pick" for old radio's and TV's. That is how I fell in love with DX'ing and getting jolted by B+. Man, I should have died 10 times over by the time I was 12-13 years old.
Just for fun and in case there is any interest I will see if I can put together some URL's pointing out some details of that first passive multi-turn resonant loop antenna that made LWBC possible for me. 73 Gedas W8BYA