[Antennas] Lots of land, trees, and wire

Fri Jan 16 16:09:44 EST 2009

The horizontal loop! 
Make it a full wavelength long, preferably for 160 meters (540 feet or so). Two wavelengths is even better for gain but results in even more nulls and lobes on upper bands.
Put it up as high as you can get it all the way around.
Insulated wire is fine, and especially if you plan on running through tree limbs and bushes.
It can be in the shape of a square, a rectangle, or irregular, but the closer to a circle the better.
Feed it wherever convenient with open wire feedline, ladder line, window line or similar.
Use a balanced tuner if possible but most anything robust enough to handle some pretty high voltages/current (depending on the power you run) will work well on all bands from the fundamental up.
Use a 1:1 balun and a short length of coax if necessary to get the feedline into the shack.
There you go! Visit www.n4kc.com and see my trials and travails with the horizontal loop. Also Google W4RNL and read his various articles on the antenna.
That's my recommendation. Let me know what you end up doing.
73,
Don N4KC
www.n4kc.com
www.donkeith.com
www.n4kc.blogspot.com 
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