I finally put together my small transmitting loop antenna. It’s held together with zip ties, sits on a PVC stand in my kitchen and overall is a real mess, but it’s a start and appears to (mostly) work.

Adjusting the capacitor feels almost impossible. I either need a great big reduction gearbox, or to build my own with a more reasonable capacitance range.

I tried to build a fancy coupling loop out of some nice expensive cable, but I don’t have a soldering iron powerful enough… So it’s a few strands of copper wire braided together.

It resulted in an awful SWR of 1.9 on 40m. But there are lots of things to play with.

I cannot actually (legally) transmit so I just ran some Rx tests on FT8 over 24h using a Airspy HF+ Discovery.

Was planning on running the same 24hr test using my YouLoop but I’m a little worried about the results…