[Lowfer] Labour Day antenna

[John Bruce McCreath]

In keeping with a decades long tradition of putting up a new
antenna or improving one that is already up, my project for
this year was to tinker with my remotely tuned BCB  loop.  
The antenna proper is a single-turn loop of 5 feet diameter
made from a length of large helix.  It’s oriented east-west.
The tinker job was to replace the zip cord feed line with a
 less lossy 450 ohm ladder line.

There is around 25 feet of feed line between the loop and
the matching device.  The latter is a series-tuned circuit
which covers the 630 to 160 meter bands with 2 ranges.
The series circuit connects to the external antenna jack of
my DX-440 receiver.  The feed line from the loop connects
to a 6 turn link, located between the 2 main windings that
are contra-wound, and can be connected in series or in
parallel as needed, at the flip of a switch.

The antenna works very well now, the improvement likely
due to getting rid of the lossy zip cord feed line.  The loop
does indeed tune, which was confirmed by placing a small
transistor radio within the loop.  It was tuned to a Toronto
AM station on 740 kHz., and when the indoor L-C circuit
was tuned, the radio’s volume increased considerably at
resonance!

73, J.B., VE3EAR