Indoor antenna for DX-160

[K7MFC]

I recently picked up a Realistic DX-160 and I'm looking for suggestions or advice on an indoor antenna.

I think a long wire antenna is probably what I need - at first strung up in my office, but I would like to install it in the attic eventually. I have a few questions:

What wire is best for an indoor antenna?

Does it have to be bare copper?

How long should it be?

 

[mmckenna]

I recently picked up a Realistic DX-160 and I'm looking for suggestions or advice on an indoor antenna.


I think a long wire antenna is probably what I need - at first strung up in my office, but I would like to install it in the attic eventually. I have a few questions:

What wire is best for an indoor antenna?

Does it have to be bare copper?

How long should it be?

Check into an end fed half wave antenna. If you are comfortable "rolling your own" transformers, you can make your own pretty easily. 9:1 ratio is commonly use, but you can play with others. I rolled a 9:1 and a 16:1 to play with, and it works well enough. I've got about 35 feet of speaker wire strung in my back yard. You could easily do the same thing in your attic. The type of wire isn't a big deal, any copper wire will work fine. In the attic, it's not going to get a lot of wind load, so no big deal. It's end fed, so you can put the coax and transformer at one end and stretch the wire as long as you can across your attic, doesn't necessarily need to be a straight line.

Yea, for the purists, larger gauge wire will have more bandwidth, and insulation can impact resonate frequency, but this is for short wave listening, it's an old radio, and you are sticking in your attic. Try something and see how it works. Don't get too hung up on measurements.

 

[K7MFC]

Thanks for the reply - lots of info out there for end fed half wave antennas so I'll read up a bit. It is an old radio, and an indoor antenna will obviously be a compromise, so I'm just looking for something "good 'nuff." My old radios are really a temporary distraction from work..