Magnetic Loop

Recently at my local radio club, a HAM was selling a magnetic loop which he had acquired at a car boot sale. I’ve always been fascinated with loops and wanted the opportunity to play with one.

As you can see, somebody has put a lot of time and effort into making this. Naturally, we took the loop for a test drive at a POTA site in Stevenage and to my amazement we manage to make around 40 QSO‘s even getting into the United States!

To be honest I initially was more interested by the capacitor. The plan was to make another loop that can fit an existing stand which is portable but a fellow ham M1GEO encourage me to bring the loop out and here we are operating the loop on the ICOM 7300 Mk2 

Here are a few close-ups of the capacitor

260 pF capacitor from 1962

The loop itself is 95 cm in diameter. There’s nothing very complicated about it and it works surprisingly well. As with any loop tuning them is a challenge, so for my next project I will make a remote tuner and make the loop more compact for portable operations.

73