I found some Chinese "active loop antennas" on eBay the other day, the price
was reasonable at $25, so I decided that it was worth the risk trying it out.
Since it had the brand name "Degen" (type "31MS" - guess that would mean MW and SW) Joachim and I joked about it being a "degenerative" antenna.
I picked the antenna up at the post office today, and gave it a brief try, and it looks like it lives up to its name and that the joke was not really a joke at all.
The first thing that happened was that a suction cup for mounting the antenna on a window would not stick to any window at all, poor manufacture quality, even for a Chinese product. It did not bode well.
On MW the S/N is lower on the Degen than on the built-in ferrite antenna. on a part of shortwave it looks like it has some minor gain on frequencies in the 5 - 15 MHz range, but its effectiveness was not easily detectable.
I may have to try it during daytime, but I am not optimistic.
If you see it for sale, it does NOT have my recommendation. I may be able to use parts of it for experiments, but I doubt it will do much for me.
In any case I intend to take it apart and see how they managed to do so little.
Conclusion : Cheap antenna with cheap performance.
FAIL.
KE5HPY's Altoids Direct-Conversion Receiver for 40 Meters
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Click on the image for a much clearer view.
*It is a thing of beauty. You can see all four stages in there. There is
the Bandpass Filter in the upper l...
2 hours ago
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