More experimentation with the horizontal room loop

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KB2GOM

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Rensselaer County New York
Somewhere here on RR, I read that somebody had really good luck with a 45-foot long wire with a 9:1 balun for shortwave listening. So why not a 9:1s balun on the horizontal room loop (a 50-foot wire running around near the ceiling of my radio shack and feeding my Grundig Satellit 800) and feed it to the coax connector on the back?

So I tried it. Results: not one speck of improvement; it didn't improve the noise floor; nothing.

Ok, let's try running 50 feet of wire outside, along the edge of the house and the deck and bring it into the Satellit through the balun and coax setup. The result: Not one iota of improvement over the horizontal room loop.

Saw some David Casler YouTube videos comparing magnetic loop antennas with a vertical; some noise improvement, but not so dramatic that it made me want to reach for my wallet.

Bottom line: I don't think I am going to get a serious improvement in HF antenna performance (listening) until I can manage to get a 100 wire up high, and that will require a long run of coax to get to it.

Meantime, the horizontal room loop works pretty well, certainly better than the whip antenna on the Satellit 800.
 

MTScannerNut

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Aug 25, 2017
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NW Montana
I think you asked me about the 60' random wire I installed strung under the eaves of my roof. Plugged directly into my radio, no transformer of any kind. The results were surprisingly good, but I had a lot of noise. I just installed a 130' end fed with a 49:1 unun and it is a dramatic improvement. The antenna is from myantennas.com. I also installed a bunch of ferrite chokes at the entrance to my shack as well as right before the radio (Icom R8600). Noise floor dropped big time. Now I get stations that I simply could not hear over the noise before. This time I ran the antenna away from my house to a fence post on my property.
 

KB2GOM

Active Member
Joined
Jun 1, 2020
Messages
613
Location
Rensselaer County New York
I think you asked me about the 60' random wire I installed strung under the eaves of my roof. Plugged directly into my radio, no transformer of any kind. The results were surprisingly good, but I had a lot of noise. I just installed a 130' end fed with a 49:1 unun and it is a dramatic improvement. The antenna is from myantennas.com. I also installed a bunch of ferrite chokes at the entrance to my shack as well as right before the radio (Icom R8600). Noise floor dropped big time. Now I get stations that I simply could not hear over the noise before. This time I ran the antenna away from my house to a fence post on my property.

Thanks, interesting!
 
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