That Striveday kit is exceptionally useful for this build. In fact, it might be the ideal material for your HF coil for a few specific reasons.
## Why Solid Wire Wins Here
The label specifying "Solid Wire" rather than stranded is a huge advantage. Stranded silicone wire is famously floppy, making it difficult to keep tight on a smooth PVC pipe. Solid 22 AWG holds its formed shape beautifully. Once you wrap it around the 1/2-inch form, it will stay put, making it much easier to fashion the tap loops for your banana plug interface without the entire coil springing loose.
## The Built-In Capacitance Fix
That specific wire is typically manufactured for breadboarding and prototyping, meaning it has a fairly robust insulation jacket — usually around 1.5 mm to 1.6 mm in total outer diameter.
Here is how the physical math plays out for your 5-inch (127 mm) limit:
By winding this wire tightly against itself, the copper conductors remain perfectly spaced apart by exactly double the thickness of the insulation. This built-in dielectric spacing drastically cuts the inter-turn capacitance, which is exactly what you need to keep the signal from bleeding past the coil on the 30–42 MHz frequencies of Band 6.
## Sweeping for Dead Spots
Because the turn count maxes out right around that 80-turn sweet spot we estimated for Band 2, you likely won't have to force anything to make it fit your 5-inch form constraint. Once you have the plug-board junctions soldered, you can just sweep the coil with your OWON function generator and monitor the response on your Tektronix scope to map out the exact resonant peaks. This will tell you instantly if the unused outer sections are acting as traps and creating dead spots on the higher bands, allowing you to easily decide if you need to use shorting jumpers.
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Last modified: Wednesday, 29 Jul 2026