After a couple of minor modifications (different soundcard, thicker piece of wire from the top of the loading coil), I ran a test carrier from 13:15 to 15:15 UT. I briefly ventured pushing the drive up to 0.42 A (= 30.0 kV rms) with no adverse effects, but then settled to 0.35 A to have a bit of margin for the long transmission. Unfortunately not much appeared in Heidelberg and Breclav in the upcoming afternoon QRN. But then, looking at Paul's spectrogram saved my day:

 

All the best,

Markus (DF6NM)