I finally have an antenna in the air. After a lot of thought about the shape of our lot, the placement of trees, and how to avoid obstructing my children’s use of the yard, I settled on an end-fed halfwave, the LNR Precision EF-10/20/40 Mk II.
The main challenge of the installation was minimizing the ground area obstructed. I have two small children who like to run and play, so guy lines spanning the yard is out of the question. Similarly, I don’t want to set up an inverted-V anchored at the ground. I solved the problem by sloping it between two trees. The high end hangs about 40 feet up from a cedar, and the low end is 8 feet up in a pine. (It’s not for nothing that Washington is the Evergreen State.) Both are right by our property lines, so the entire assembly, including the feed line, are out of the way.
I tuned it with a signal generator and my trusty Oak Hills Research QRP power meter. The SWR bandwidth is broader than I expected. I’ll see how it holds up with higher power output — it’s always possible my generator’s output is too low for an accurate reading.
I can’t wait to try it on the air.
The kit is marketed for kids 13 and up. Nick is still in kindergarten, but loves anything motorized or electronic, so we did it together. The manual used exploded assembly diagrams to show how the pieces went together. Few words are used, and some skill in interpreting drawings is helpful in figuring out the steps. In other words, this was very much a collaborative effort for us. I figured out what went where, he found the parts, and we jointly did the assembly. Though one could probably do the project alone, there certainly were times when it helped to have four hands.
The robot is built around a drive train, the pieces for which are separately bagged. This suggests it’s common to other robot kits. Though the assembly instructions were clear, the gears were fiddly to assemble. At one point, we managed to undo almost all of our previous work when we tried to slip the last gear onto its shaft. No matter; we were able to put it back together. At this point in the assembly, with a drivetrain and a bottom plate, the possibilities of hacking this robot became clear. 
The controller for the robot comes preassembled. The IC on top of the board is a microcontroller. It is house-labelled for Elenco, but I suspect it’s a standard part with custom firmware. The manual has a schematic, so I compared the pinout to PICs and AVRs without finding a match. Maybe it’s a 68HC05 or another small micro. The assembly drawing pictured a socket under the microcontroller, but no such luck on this production unit. (By this time, I was started to get intrigued by the modification possibilities for this little robot.) 
