Any Ideas For An Antenna for a Kenwood R-1000 Shortwave Receiver?

[RayAir]

It doesn't have it's own antenna. Anyone have any recommended indoor antennas for SW?

 

[mass-man]

a decent length of almost any kind of wire attached to the antenna terminal...strung up along the edge of the ceiling...get fancier and put it in the attic. Or open the window, scrape a bit of window screen clean and attach a short piece of wire from the receiver to that. There are more options than you can imagine.

 

[ridgescan]

True-and you can even attach an alligator clip to the end of a steel tape measure, hook it to the ant terminal and run that tape measure out as far as you can in the room-it works ok. Will you be considering going outside eventually?

 

[RayAir]

True-and you can even attach an alligator clip to the end of a steel tape measure, hook it to the ant terminal and run that tape measure out as far as you can in the room-it works ok. Will you be considering going outside eventually?

I don't plan on going to an outside antenna. Unfortunately, I live in a subdivision with antenna restrictions. Years ago I had hide an antenna up one of the trees in my backyard. A couple of years ago I noticed the entire fiberglass base of the antenna was blown out and shredded. It looked like damage from an indirect lightning strike. I never went through the effort to put any more antennas up.

The tape measure is interesting. I was sort of thinking along the lines of using some small gauge wire, maybe solid bare copper?

 

[jackj]

If you are on the 2nd floor or higher, 18 or 20 gauge wire run along the baseboard will work well. You can even cut it as a center fed, 1/2 wave folded dipole on the higher frequencies.

 

[ridgescan]

I agree with Jack. I use #10 on the roof but this isnt doable indoors because of non flexibility. You can also tactfully tack that #14 wire all the way around the perimeter of your listening room up by the ceiling then lead into the radio-this is sort of a loop that can null some of the RFI you will get with an indoor antenna.

 

[ka3jjz]

If you have your own home in that subdivision (not a condo or apartment) then you have a few options. Probably one of the least visible would be to attach some clear or white colored wire (nice and thin) under the soffet close to the gutter. Feed that down into a 9:1 transformer then coax to the receiver. The wire will be next to invisible to anyone.

If you are on the East Coast, don't go too long - 40 or 50 foot would probably be as much as I would go. A R-1000 has a very hot front end, and overloads easily. If you are in the Midwest or on the West Coast, you can likely go somewhat longer. You can also wind a little skyloop on the roof, and no one will ever see it unless they're flying (!!)

9:1 transformers - also known as 'Magnetic Longwire Baluns' - are easy to get and inexpensive. For example, there's one from WinRadio (you can get the WinRadio balun from Grove, for example). We have some links for them in our HF Antennas article (linked below), or you can wind your own from plans found in the SWL Antenna Yahoo group...

HF Antennas - The RadioReference Wiki

73 (best regards) Mike

 

[g5turbo81]

R-1000 Antenna

You could try a Folded Dipole. Get some 300 ohm twinlead... Make one long piece and short out both ends. in the middle of it, split the bottom wire and and tin it.. Feed it with another piece of 300 ohm twinlead.. Connect to a tuner that has a balanced line input and fire away.. I make one for the garage and it does awesome. Should be close enough at 270 Ohms..