The Chalk line reels were dirt cheap plastic items made in China and were about NZD$8 each,, throw the string away. I filled the reels with AWG24 (I think) wire. The appropriate bands are marked with a permanent marker after scuffing the sheath with sand paper. if you don't the marker comes off, typically on your hands when you wind it in particularly when moisture is present. The typical marking I did was Morse stripes that were listed. that is "a" for 10m SSB top and "B" for 10m SSB bottom. The top and bottom of the voice sections are more inportant on 80m. And eventualyy you get used to particular spots. for 3.677 I can wind it out to the mark I use at 3.625 and then wind in one turn on the reel and I'm location dependent within half a turn of correct length for resonace and SWR.
The wire was passed through 2 sizes of heat shring to form the loop for strain relief and the end terminted with banana plugs (I had them and they are easy to disconnect after). If your too hard on pulling the aerial centre or the flys lead from the loop is to short they will un plug a bit too easily. I discovered this with the End Feed Half Wave Zepp on my Whanganui River trip and it took a few readjustements to get the length on the fly lead right.
Attached to the strain loop is a loop of string and a clip swivel from a fishing supplies outlet.
At the dipole centre the toroid has banana jacks, the string/cord loop and clip swivel are shorter than the length of wire and banana plug. This is to ensure you don't pull the dipol apart putting it up or down or when the wind comes up.
A few more photographs to follow however this will suffice for now.
I pack rather differently depending on what I'm doing on each trip. For light travel the bridge, RG174 feed line and dipole are taken with FT817 and 1.3 AHr SLA. This will do for an overnight tramp and give approximately 90mins with 5W PEP, longer with 2.5W PEP. For a longer trip I take a small solar panel, solar generator and sometimes the bigger 2.2AHr cell.
The dipole is great however when your tucked up in a tent or it's wet and dark out is not so practical for swaping bands. When the weight is not so much of an issue due to reduced walking times then I swap the RG174 feed for the 300Ohm Ribbon feed line and MFJ904.
More recently on the Canoe trip I took along a Zepp and used this with the tuner for 80m. Certainly in ZL forest it was much nicer to put out the one wire, rather than a dipole.
The next stage is to drop the 300 Ohm ribbon feed line and MFJ904. To do this requires a parallel LC Tuner, however it's smaller and lighter than the MFJ904.
Read the PDF, it's the original intrctions that came with the kit. This coupled with the small panel is quite effective in topping up small SLA cells when on the move in our bush environment.