Only vertical better than one near the ocean is one a few thousand miles from land ON the ocean!  Wanna try it?  See your Navy recruiter...

Check out Cubex.  They sell whole antennas as kits, and the pieces are available separately.  For a 10 meter quad, of course, the spreaders won't be anywhere near the length of a typical tribander.  Have fun.

There's a very good book, "Cubical Quad Antennas", by Bill Orr and Stuart Cowan.  YOu'll find a lot of good reading there.

The antenna is installed "on the ridge" of the roof -- how far ABOVE the roof?  It isn't just sitting there on the roof itself, right?

What's in the space below the roof?  Attic space or ... ?  Nearby metallic objects in there like vent ducting or metallic shingles?  Foil-faced insulation... piping...

Just guessing here, because you say you can hear stronger stations like W1AW, so the receiver isn't dead.  Some home electronics might be causing the noise on 30/40 meters.  Any local hams/club members who can listen for you?

In the early 1960s, Navy Radiomen still did a lot of maintenance on "their" equipment that the Electronics Techs didn't bother with.  In RM "A" school, a good amount of class time was devoted to troubleshooting and repair.  We'd work in groups of two, inserting what was supposed to be a difficult problem into an audio amplifier.  Then we'd pass it to the next group for them to work on and hopefully fix.

I pushed back the insulation on a piece of wire and snipped about 1/16" of conductor off.  Then replaced the insulation.  It took them half an hour to find it, and this was after the instructor had stepped in to "help"!

That must have been in Finnish; it sure as heck wasn't English!

I've heard Finnish code, sent by Mr. Nokia for Southeast Asia at the time, Simo Hoikka, in Singapore, 1993.  Baffling - and the reaction by OH stations was detectable if not copiable!

Whistling into a microphone doesn't do anything for your transmitted signal unless you live in some of the more remote areas in the Canary Islands.  Use your voice and make the necessary adjustments with mike gain/ALC and compression.  Monitor things with an o'scope or (ideally) a spectrum analyzer.

Well, that explains it.  You no longer get a "shave and a haircut", but you still have to pay the "two bits".  It's called "economics" and it gives me a headache.   

For an SWL antenna, you would be MUCH better off just experimenting with different antennas in the space you have readily available.  My very first SWL antenna was some #22 solid copper wire running diagonally across my bedroom ceiling, held up on the ends with thumbtacks and dropping straight down to the receiver.  How long was it?  Long enough to go diagonally .... You get the idea.

Experiment.  See what works.  Then try another variation and see if there is any difference.  For receive-only antennas you don't have to worry about SWR, and you certainly don't have to buy a preassembled, overpriced commercial kludge.

Yes - that's at least 52 years old.  Comes from one station sending "SK 73 de K7KBN ese."

The "ese" part, of course, sounds like "shave and a haircut".  The other station sends the "ee", representing the "two bits".

In 1959 I bought a second-hand SX-99 Hallicrafters receiver and became WPE7YQ (Popular Electronics SWL "license").  This was right at the peak of the greatest solar cycle DXing has ever known, and Radio Moscow (RM) was like picking apples off a tree.  Often, the English-language broadcasts from RM announced that they were trying different power levels and antennas, and asked us SWLs to send signal reports.  So I did, and received nice "special" QSL cards.

In my senior year of high school, I had to do a report on the USSR.  Everybody got a different country, and I had been a couple minutes late to class on the day the countries were assigned, so I got the nearly-impossible one.  The American Government teacher knew the encyclopedia versions of every country on earth, so I couldn't rely on that.  But maybe RM might be able to help.  I wrote them a letter and sent it (gasp!) AIR MAIL!  Then, for a couple of months, I forgot about the report.

I got home from school one day.  Dad was at work, Mom was at the grocery store, and there was a note for me to call Mr. Huntridge, the Las Vegas postmaster.  He was a family friend, went to Vegas High with my dad and all.  I called, and he asked me to come to the main post office with our pickup truck and some identification.  The receptionist showed me in, and Mr. Huntridge introduced me to two gentlemen - one a postal inspector and the other one from the FBI.  There were two fairly large wooden crates on the floor - with Cyrillic lettering on them - addressed to ME!

We opened the crates then and there.  The FBI and Postal Inspector both seemed disappointed that there were no AK-47s or books about "how to build big bomb".  Just books, in English, with pretty good quality binding, of Soviet geography, history (their version), Russian/English dictionaries, recordings of folk songs and basic "How to speak Russian".  There were 17 people in my class, including the teacher, and there were 20 copies of everything.

The classroom wasn't used for anything for an hour before our American Government class, so I slipped away from school, walked the three blocks home, and drove back to the school.  I deposited one copy of each item on the desks, drove back home and walked back to school.  I was a few minutes late, and when I walked in I apologized.  "I see you found my report," I said.

"Yes, we did!", the teacher replied.  "You got an A.  First "A" I ever gave for a report on the USSR!"

I have a friend whose father,  now SK, was a ham so she grew up hearing 73 and 88 all the time.  Once, when I emailed her, I finished with "73/88".  She reminded me that I'm happily married, and suggested that the "88" part belongs at home.

So from then on, I've used "44".  She caught right on with that!

I believe "G-Shock" is a model of Casio watches, not a brand by itself.

As far as alarm clocks, my hearing has gotten so bad that I can't rely on a regular alarm beeping to wake me up if I'm really sound asleep.  So, enter the Casio Hunter/Fisherman Watch.  I've never hunted, and haven't been seriously fishing for a few decades, BUT this watch has a vibrating mode that would wake me up if I was dead!

About the only thing I don't like about it is that I can't put a regular band on it - like a Twist-o-flex®.

Best watch I ever had was a Casio with thermometer.  With its internal adjustment, I could regulate it to within half a second every 3 months.  The thermometer was accurate as long as it stayed on my arm and was therefore at a pretty constant ambient.

Navy shipboard communications before the advent of communications satellites involved transmitting and receiving CW, using R-390 receivers and HF transmitters that might only be a couple hundred feet apart and not cross-polarized.  Transmitter powers were at least 500 watts most of the time.

The R-390 front end was essentially bulletproof.  Even with the overload, we operators could easily hear the other station "break" us in between dits and dahs.

And this was on a carrier! Flight deck area was over 5 acres.  The destroyers and other ships in company had the same communications requirements but with a whole lot less real estate to stick antennas.

If the metal roof is in a number of easy-to-work-with separate sheets, you'll have to bond them all together to get one continuous surface for your ground plane/counterpoise (just placing them in contact won't work very long, if at all).  Clean metal to clean metal.

The bonding will also help greatly in reducing the noise that can occur when random bits of metal are in loose contact in an RF environment.