Wednesday this week Magnus SM7TVC came by to visit and help me put up a new multiband antenna. I had decided on a horizontal loop, circumventing half of the garden.

ladder line feed to horizontal loop
I already had four fastening points ready, so “all we had to do” was to pull up the antenna wire into and over the trees. A task that took almost five hours including cutting some branches, pruning a couple of trees and using the Apache bow to shoot a pulling line through a tree to get the antenna wire through the tree itself.
After connecting the ladder feed line we could quickly test to match the antenna to 50 Ohm. Quite easily the SWR value was tuned to less than 1:1.2 on all bands between 1,6 and 28MHz. Later in the evening when Magnus had left I worked the first QSO, R1963VT on 28MHz.
Summing up the construction: The horizontal loop is somewhat rectangualar in shape, a little more than 110 meters long. The height is between 8 and 18 meters above ground, with most of the loop more than 11 meters up. The loop is fed with ladder line and S-match is used for transformation to 50 Ohm.

S-Match
During the weekend the house has been full with visiting family, giving me no chance to test the antenna any further. But today as everybody left us to go back home for a new work week I had a few hours on and off in front of the radio. Band conditions were not at its greatest, I could hear some stations outside Europe in North America, Africa, and Asia on 14MHz. But signals were weak and intermittent. A handful of Europeans were worked – great fun to be back on air again!