I crawled up from the basement listening post last night and did some antenna comparisons with my box loop that I normally don't use (because it's deaf in the basement). I compared my 3' box loop against a 85' wire that slopes up to the top of a 70 ft oak tree. As has always been stated, vertical antennas are noisy, that's what I found too. Using just the loop on 750khz with WSB nulled, I could hear two different spanish stations weakly just above the noise. I then turned the loop so WSB was peaked, then phased them down with the wire (MFJ1026). The spanish stations were inaudible, only band noise was heard. The wire is awesome on the 60 and 90 meter tropical bands, but on MW, it's not the best performer. I had the gut feeling that the wire would outperform the loop because of the height, but that was wrong.
I also hooked up the Palstar MW550P MW tuner that I recently purchased from K3PI to the box loop. With the 12 db of amplification it provides, plus the 10db pre-amp of my modified Icom R71a, signals are simply screaming in now. I had Mexico City's XEX, 730khz, S9+10db on a particularly normal night. This aleviates my fears that I would miss something while using the loop because it might not be sensitive enough. The box loop has plenty of gain now! Due to the natural resonance of the tuner and that of the loop, when tuned up on 730khz, my super-pest local station on 1290 was a mere S9 with both pre-amps on instead of the needle pegging signal it usually puts in, so I have no fear of images despite the large amount of amplification. This could be a powerful combo ... box loop plus Palstar preselector and I intend on putting it through it's paces in the comming months. Tonight, I'll take the loop outside in the yard. I've had better results with it out there in the past and with the pre-amps on it, it should really be a signal getter. As I get my EWE's put back up in the yard, I'll make more comparison's against the amplified loop and report my findings. 73! John Wilke K9RZZ Milwaukee ---[Start Commercial]--------------------- World Radio TV Handbook 2004 is out! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823059685/hardcoredxcom ---[End Commercial]----------------------- ________________________________________ Hard-Core-DX mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dallas.hard-core-dx.com/mailman/listinfo/hard-core-dx http://www.hard-core-dx.com/ _______________________________________________ THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt
