Last week I rebuilt the OCFD. My old 100 watt balun was not in the greatest shape. I did my best to tighten everything down inside the balun but it was a bit iffy. It is the kind that is built into a PVC pipe and PVC ends. I don't know what caused the mechanical issue other than strain relief may have failed the first time I had it up. I am expecting a new, aluminum cased, 1000 watt 4:1 current balun today.
My current SWR on the ham bands rests around 2.5 to 3.3. Not good even though the 710 comes with a state of the art high speed auto tuner.

However, that didn't stop me from testing it on receive and needless to say I was impressed. The low noise floor really helps bring out signals. I compared it on receive with the ArgoV and the Radio Shack DX-394 (my nostalgia radio) and even though the ArgoV has great receive and audio, the 710 pretty much blew it out of the park. The DX-394, not a great rig if one were to be totally honest, benefited greatly from a modern wide band preamp in line with the coax. On a small antenna, 30' and the preamp in line, it really woke it up. On the OCFD there were times when I would turn the preamp off or turn down the receive gain to about 20%.

Other testing included trying the OCFD on the dedicated 10 meter set up. I was able to load up the antenna using an MFJ tuner and get an SWR reading of 1.25. Receive-wise I had to run a preamp to hear like I normally do on the dedicated 10 meter dipoles. I tried about 50 watts through it and no more. Peak reading meter showed an excess of 120 watts USB on 28.406 (a local ragchew frequency) PEP and while I was able to make contacts I shut everything down because even at the lowest setting (about 18 watts) I was still getting up to 90 watts PEP on USB. I don't know if that's good or bad.

I will install the new balun tomorrow and do all the tests over. If the SWR is still high on the ham bands I will take the next step and adjust wire lengths. If that fails I will go to the local Tractor Supply and get a quarter mile roll of steel electric fence wire. Yep, that's the smallest roll they have and it's really cheap! A tiny fraction of the cost of a roll of 12 gauge copper wire from the hardware store. The only drawback is dealing with uninsulated steel wire where it passes over black walnut tree branches. This tree is about 100' tall, has 3 trunks and a lot of top branches to use as support. Based on my lot logistics a good bit of the antenna has to go through branches. About half the antenna has to go through branches.

I use a 9 foot heavy duty fishing rod with 65 lb braid to get the initial small rope up in the tree, then attach that to the heavier main rope (UV Dacron about double the diameter of 550 paracord). The weight on the end of the 65 lb braid is 4.5 ounces attached to 2 heavy duty steel leaders in parallel. Ask me why I use 2 like that. My aim is pretty good but some days it take a couple of tries! If you don't get your target then remove the weight before reeling your line back in. Pro tip: Wrap your weight in bright orange or yellow tape. When the neighbors ask, I just tell them I'm squirrel fishing!