After three days of gathering data on the shortened 30m vertical, I switched this morning - which had become quite windy and cold - to a 10mm microbore pipe, remote-tuned, magnetic loop antenna. The idea being to see what kind of difference in performance there might be.
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| Sunny, but Arctic cold! |
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| Vertical, up to blue box, does very well indeed at 30m. Blue box area is elevated, small 10mm pipe loop, light pink box area is larger loop of 15mm pipe, ground mounted. |
By the way, this is the matching of the circular loop above:
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| Ground mounted loop of 15mm pipe. |
No real surprise that the quite small elevated loop sees a significant drop in comparative performance against the vertical. What is a little surprising is the apparent lack of any difference between the ground mounted loop (no more than about 3cm above soil) and the quite well-elevated loop (at about 1.2m centre height). The ground proximity must be causing some losses, but the size of the loop and the pipe diameter seem to make up for the lack of elevation compared to the smaller loop. Useful to know if you have difficulty with neighbours or wind, or both!
Interesting, tnx for testing this. Signals are not too different. If you can only operate with a magnetic loop you will do fine. I already new that. Although bigger is in most cases always better. 73, Bas
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