Jock Elliott's Radio Shack Gets an Antenna Upgrade — Hidden Around the Walls and Ceiling

When ham radio enthusiast Jock Elliott needed a bigger antenna, he decided to put together something a little more subtle: a "horizontal room loop" hidden around the edges of his radio shack.

"When my radio room was in the front of the house (on the east side), it was easy to run a feed-line to a large RF-hungry SWL dipole with various stubs and feeders," Elliott writes of the project, on the SWLing blog. "My main SWL receiver is a Satellit 800, which has the guts of a Drake R8 and also has a large telescoping vertical antenna."

"It works okay, but I wanted more signal. I had been looking at small loops and got some great recommendations on Radio Reference, but then I had a thought: what if I turned the 8′ x 12′ room into a giant horizontal passive loop?"

The benefit of a passive loop antenna is that it's very simple to make: Just run a measured length of wire in a loop, and connect to your radio. "I ran the resultant 50-foot strand [of wire] around the perimeter of the room by taping the wire to the top of window frames and hiding the wire on the top shelves of book cases," Elliott writes. "As a result, the horizontal room loop is near the ceiling, about 7 feet in the air, and the room itself is on the first floor.

"There’s a switch on the back of the 800 that allows me to quickly compare the loop with the radio’s built-in vertical antenna. And it works! It pulls in more signal than the vertical (as measured on the signal strength meter), but I have not noticed a dramatic reduction in noise. On some stations, the horizontal room loop brings the signal up to full scale, and then the sound is very agreeable indeed."

The full project write-up is available on the SWLing blog.