new loop antenna which folds up when its not in use..

I found a good way today to make a loop which can be folded away simply when I am not using it. It only took around five minutes..

I have a pair of TV rabbit ears which I have had for a long time.. I am sure everyone who has owned a portable TV probably has something like it or has in the past.. I live in the US which has recently switched over to digital TV, so I no longer have the 13 inch Emerson TV it was associated with.. but I kept the antenna..

Anyway, it is nothing at all special, just a dipole with a short length of 300 ohm twinlead attached to it..but it has the advantage of being fairly light and compact.. So, anyway, looking for a way to redo my loop antenna - since I've been using it a lot.. and it was kind of unsightly..So, anyway, since the rabbit ears can be inserted into the top of a camera tripod I have, I decided to turn them into a portable basic loop for my upconverter setup.. for shortwave listening..

I clipped a wire between both tips of the telescoping antennas to connect the two- the three making a triangular loop.

I chopped the flat 300 ohm twinlead off fairly short and connected the twinlead to the inner two terminals of a 4 screw old style terminal block..then to a multiganged variable capacitor.

Then I have 75 ohm coax going up to the rabbit ears using the outer two terminals of the block, and then to the pickup loop which is only a piece of insulated wire which parallels a portion of the bottom of the triangle..Below, the 75 ohm coax feeds into a variable attenuator, which is connected to my upconverter.

I have mostly been using a back-biased MVAM109 varactor diode to tune the loop, and that works well, but unfortunately, the tuning on it is very sharp and I dont have any multiturn potentiometers.. For the time being at least, I decided to return to an air variable since I recently got a nice air variable with a reduction gear which makes for a nice tuning experience.

I connected the smallest portion of the gang permanently and now I have a small alligator clip which can be moved very easily to insert the largest portion of the capacitor so it can tune the bottom portion of its range. If I want to go even lower, I can add two more portions of the capacitor. I'll see what kind of range it has later tonight. (people should see what the bands look like, as I understand it, there is a solar storm going on.. there may even be an aurora at lower latitudes)

First impressions .. it seems to work great..Its light and easy to rotate while I am doing other things.. It also seems to have a sharper null , probably because the plane of the loop is almost perfectly flat. And its very light and of course, also as its a dipole its balanced so if I want to redo it in the future, say, a bit farther away from all my electronics..maybe put a servo motor on it or something, I will probably be able to do that with a very small, cheap servo.. and since its bidirectional I wont even have to modify it to turn 360.

It would be great to be able to put it a bit of a distance away from our other electronics a bit, I am sure that would do wonders for HF reception.