An 80 meter multiturn magnetic loop antenna

As we live in a relatively small plot, I don't have room for big antennas, even for an antenna like 80 meter dipole. I have my multiband GP antenna at my backyard, and my 2m/70cm dualband quad antenna, so I can be QRV from 40m to 70cm. I've always liked 80 meters, but because the lack of antenna, I've only had a possility to RX this great band. Surfing the internet, I found two sites about this antenna concept Harry Lythall's and Dr Jonathan Hare's pages.

The itself antenna is really straight forward and since the instructions can be found from the links mentioned above I only added few pics about the project which took about 3 hours to complete. I will give you more information about how the antenna works when I've gained a little bit some experience with it.

I know that this antenna isn't the best one and you really cannot compare it with a full size dipole, but hey it works amazingly well and you can get QSOs with it!

See you laters and check out the pics!

Update 15.9.2008

Last saturday my mate Markus OH1MN came over for few beers and pizza. Markus suddenly remembered the 80m magloop. There hasn't been time or place, for outdoor testing so far, so we decided to do some.

We put the magloop outside to the backyard, against few chairs, just barely above the ground, tuned it in and listened to the band. There wasn't anything interesting on the fone section, so we decided to give the PSK31 a try. We took 2 QSOs, both to Belarus!!! We were using my homebrew SDR transceiver with just around 8-9W output. Amazed again!

Update 25.3.2008

The antenna seems to work amazingly well. Last friday I got stucked to a Finnish 80m rag chew frequency and noticed that I could copy Finnish hams all the way up to the north. Most important, they were able to copy me. I even got few 59s! I was using my homebrew Software Defined Transceiver and approximately 16 Watts output.