I’m a new General Class and have great respect for those who earned their license before they dropped the CW requirement. My goal is to learn CW before the end of the year. I feel lucky that I have a local club with active members and usually 40-50 show up for the monthly meetings. The area I live in took three direct hits from hurricanes in 2004. Charley, Francis and Jeanne left me without power for six weeks. That was a wake up call and I’ll never be without coms again. As a noob, I just purchased my first HF rig, a ts-930s with built in tuner. I picked up a g5rv dipole and should be up and running early next week. (Have to trim some trees first).
73
I live in the same area those storms hit. Not that long without power though.
I am ready to be self sufficient for a long time, but other than regular radios I have not planned a need for communication...maybe I will be sorry, but expect to just shelter in place for a long time.
My experience feeding a standard G5RV with ~100' of coax was it was easy enough to tune for low SWR on all bands except 60M, but there was tons of loss on the higher bands, and also on 40M (for both TX and RX). SO, in that configuration it worked great for me on 75M and 20M (it is actually designed for 20M), not so well on the others.
But ditching the coax in favor of balanced feedline eliminates most of the loss so you just need the range in your tuner. The 6:1 balun helps to extend that (though you might need to switch it out for bands where your impedance is already low).
Usually, when I am running a non resonant doublet I just use a MFJ 941 manual tuner and the (nothing to write home about) built in voltage balun. For the super cheap price it does an admirable job. Others swear by those little LDG Z100 auto tuners, and they do offer a handy little balun you can plug right into the back for balanced line. I never tried one, I'm not afraid to twist some knobs. I recommend any HF operator have a manual tuner as an absolutely necessary station accessory. I operated a long time without a tuner of any kind, and now wherever I operate I bring one along. It plays into the survival aspect very well (my thing is actually portable operation). If weather or some other calamity brings down your everyday skyhook, with a manual tuner and whatever sort of wire you have on hand, you can be on the air quickly.
That Kenwood is a great rig, you take care of it and it will give you a lot of joy I think. Look around the 'net for different antennas you can build with wire, and don't be afraid to experiment.