Hi Rick I did try a Loop on the Ground a couple of years ago, and by the time I brought signals up to the same levels as my Tx antenna, the noise level was actually worse !
That's when I built my resonant Multi-turn Loop up in my loft. At least with that I was able to rotate it to null the noise as much as possible - and fortunately that ends up with it pointing East-West, which is the best direction for most DX from Britain. Most of the current high noise levels here in Britain are coming from the fact that the Internet is sent to most houses over existing copper phone wires . . . so the wires go up a 30ft wooden pole, and then fan out to the eaves of 8 or more houses . . . so there's one of these poles typically every 200 feet along each street. Those act as wonderful antennas, radiating the wideband hash from the Internet signals ! Fortunately, the phone wires in my street are underground (which is why I don't have an S9+ noise level, like most people in the city) . . . but at the end of my street there are dozens of phone wires, within one wavelength on 160m ! At least nearly all our mains cables in Britain are underground . . . 73 Roger G3YRO -----Original Message----- From: Rick Kunath [mailto:k...@yahoo.com] Sent: 08 April 2020 13:40 To: Roger Kennedy; topband@contesting.com Subject: Re: Topband: CW Activity Roger, Have you tried a LoG (Loop on Ground) receiving antenna? I have one here and it works wonders. Info at this site: http://www.kk5jy.net/LoG/ I built mine a bit larger but it's non-critical in construction. It worked wonders for me. It's also essentially invisible too. I wanted to try this so I got my hands on a 500 foot roll of twisted pair doorbell wire cheaply. I paralleled the wires for the loop and wound up using the twisted pair as a feedline to the shack. I have a 9:1 balun at the shack end. All the wire is on the ground even the feedline. It was just a quick lash up, but it worked amazingly well. I refined the install after that, and experimented with different sizes too. My loop is about double the size mentioned in the article. I was going to switch to coax buried feed and relocate the balun to the antenna end of the feedline, but it's been working so well I never got around to it. It might be worth a try. There is a Facebook group on the antenna too. Rick K9AO _________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector