WOW! I thought I had antenna problems...

Well, I've got to say that if playing radio is really important then I would consider moving. Even if it's to a higher floor. I lived in an apartment for two years but I was on the top (third) floor and had an access hole in a closet to the attic. I had an antenna farm in in the roof of that complex that rivaled some of the big guns! (Triband yagi, 40m loop, 80m Isotron, 2m/440 GP)

If moving is not an option... Once I had a QSO with a guy in your situation. He was using an SGC coupler which sat in his balcony with a short lenght of wire with an alligator clip connected to the base of the rain gutter! He had an awesome signal!

Otherwise the MFJ tuned loop might work, if you have somekind of patio or balcony you could hang it on a plant hook with a piece of rope, or a Par EndFedz (end fed dipole) going up the wall or to a nearby support of some sort or that TW2010 / Force 12 Sigma-5 antenna just sitting indoors or on your porch/balcony.

Good luck!
-Larry

I lived in a third floor apartment for two years and had a great antenna farm. The attic was 20x20 with 15' high peak so it was above average as far as attic spaces go. I had a two element 20 meter hexbeam pointed North East. A loaded 40 meter dipole and an 80 meter isotron.

But... my first attic antenna was just a loop going all the way around the attic. The cool thing about loops and dipoles is that the wire can be bent in all directions. The gain of the loop depends on the size of the aperture (the area of the inside of the loop) the radiation pattern of the loop depends on where it's fed and it's shape.

So, you can shove a 40 meter loop in there and just zig zag the wire back and fourth in the rafters to make a loop (remember the shape of those POW!! BAM!! ZOOM!! graphics from Batman comic books!) use insulated wire and string keep the wire from touching the wood. Mount your antenna coupler right on a rafter and attach the loop to it. Another apartment antenna trick is to use an artificial ground from MFJ. Get yourself a couple hundred feet of 20 gauge insulated wire and run it under the baseboards from your shack desk ALL THE WAY around the parameter of your condo interior. This will act as a tuned counterpoise for the entire station. It not only got rid of RF in my shack, but it improved my TX signal, slightly lowered RX noise and lowered the SWR on all my antennas. Make sure you double insulate the tip of that wire wherever it is because there will be high voltage present. If you have a high noise level from everyone’s plasma TV's and microwaves like I did, an MFJ-1026 helped a great deal.

Good luck!

My vote is for the IC-746 Pro. I haven't tried the 950 but I own the FT-2000 which is basically a 950 x 2. I sold my 746 to help pay for the ft-2000 and I'm a little sorry I did. It was a great size, had great DSP, plus 2 meters (100 watts all modes!) I liked everything about it. I just fell into the trance of the FT-2000's DMU display!! After the new wore off of that, I missed the 746.
I really know nothing about the TS-2000 except that it was Kenwood's top of the line rig like seven years ago.
Don't forget about the TenTec Jupiter.

Now that we've got all that covered... Forget everything I just said and order an Elecraft K3.

You don't want an antenna tuner, you want a preselector. MFJ makes several nice ones for around $100. The MFJ-1040C also has a 20dB preamp as well as a 20dB attenuator.

Forget about searching for the perfect rig, just find one that lets you utilize the preamps and DSP on those lower freqs. (these features are disabled on some radios down below 160 meters) Once you've done that build a specialized antenna system for those bands. Long wire on the ground connected to an MFJ-1020C or Wellbrook ALA-100 etc... Get a BCB notch filter from Par electronics or ICE radio products for when you want to hear the NDB's. Another option for the LF band is to get one of those converters from Palomar engineers. I think they are $100.  

I'm putting together a sytem for just such a thing right now.

1000ft wire directly on the ground to an ICE beverage matching unit, then to a Quantum Phaser from dxtools.com, the other side of the phaser will be connected to an MFJ-1020C which will have a tuned loop as an element. The output of the phaser will go to a Palstar MW550P and then to my rig. Elaborate and overly complex? Probably... but just think of all the knobs I'll be able to turn!

The best (most efficient) way in my opinion is to bring the ladder line into the shack to a fully balanced antenna tuner like the Palstar BT1500A. As long as the currents on each side of the ladder line remain the same, the RF fields around the feedline will cancel each other out and there will be no RF in the shack. MFJ makes a meter so you can see the current levels on either side of the line. As long as the ladderline is kept away from the ground and metal objects the currents will remain equal. Otherwise, you'll need a 4:1 balun to go from coax to ladderline, Palstar and DX engineering both make good ones. You don't need a balun at the antenna feedpoint. Bal-un stands for BALanced to UNbalanced. Your ladder line is balanced and your doublet is a balanced antenna therefore you don't need anything except a piece of plastic with a few holes drilled for a strain relief.

Wow! sounds like fun. Do yourself a favor and pick up a Par Electronics EndFedz dipole. If you're only running 20 watts, they have one that works on 40/20/10 meters and is rated at 25 watts. Just connect it to the back of your rig with a 10 foot piece of coax and toss the far end over a tree limb. Or pick up one of those fiberglass telescopic masts on ebay (just type in QRP in the search box) No other antenna has a higher rating than the Par endfedz dipoles in the product reviews section of this site.

Hi,
  I didnt go through all three pages of resposes so you may have already gotten your answer but I have the 30' mast from force 12, I bought an extra 6' section to make 36'. I think it's just about identical to the one youre talking about but the couplers on yours are for more of a permanent install.
I think your setup will work fine with the HexBeam on top and the rotator on the bottom. I can tell you that at 36' even the hexbeam is pushing the limit. I'm saying the limit for the 2el SteppIr on this type of mast would be 24'. Another option would be the TA-32Jr from Mosley.
How do you plan to erect the antenna? That was my biggest challenge on field day. I used the Hexbeam with a TV rotator at 30' and I thought the mast was going to snap in half when we were pushing it up! But it was fine and worked like a champ.

Mine says "RING RING ANSWER ME" in CW but with most phones you can assign different ring tones to different incoming numbers which could be cool.

RG-59 bad.
RG-213 good.

MFJ sells RF isolators, big PVC thing with like 50 chokes on a 1 foot run of RG-213. Put this after the output of your amp.