[Lowfer] its been good to know ye

[Ed Phillips]

Zack,

Sounds familiar. I have a station on 580 about 2 miles away...my 
sympathies!

You might want to consider a higher voltage for the FET, maybe 15-20 
volts, and see what happens.

Perhaps you could temporarily eliminate the protection diodes and see if 
that makes a difference. If it doesn't help, substitute a capacitor for 
the varactor and see if the intermod is coming from that.

My best results here have been in keeping the loop balanced with respect 
to ground, and tuning it with relay-switched capacitors. Some info is 
available at:
http://www.w1tag.com/rxloop.htm
Note that the preamp winds up being in the shack, and is 50 ohms in and 
out. With this setup, there has been no observable difference between 
having the preamp at the loop or inside the house.

John Andrews, W1TAG"

    You guys are sure lucky!  I have a 50 kW station on 1430 kHz just a 
bit over a mile from here.  Produces intermod from everything in sight, 
most particularly including relay contacts.  I have to cycle the relay 
on my 160 meter loading coil several times every time I try to listen on 
any band to get rid of intermod every 10 kHz "from DC to light".  Some 
of the garbage is even external to our house since I can hear it on 
portable receivers with different first IF's, etc.  I have an antenna 
tuner for my 80 meter QRP rigs which has an 0.25 amp TC ammeter to read 
antenna current.  First time I fired it up I was getting almost full 
scale using my 50' vertical and thought the rig was oscillating.  Turned 
out there was a spurious resonance in the tuner and what I was really 
doing was series resonating the setup to 1430.  A simple crystal set 
tuned to that frequency develops over 30 VDC at the detector output and 
that's probably limited by back conduction in the detector diode.

    From this sad story you can see why I don't do much LF listening any 
more and concentrate on poor weak hifer sigs.

    Count your blessings!

Ed