POLL: What type of antenna do you use?

[Pigmeat]

Phased BOGs

I added BOG and phased BOG.

I keep meaning to try a BOG or a phased BOG, I hear good things about them.

You'll like them Chris. They can turn a summer night of static into a quiet listening environment. The only caveat with the BOG is the they're height sensitive. If you've got tall grass,over 6-8 inches high,the noise will increase quite a bit if you run it on top of the grass. Try to keep the thing on the ground or very close to it.

I sometimes use a random wire tuner with one,but it's not really necessary. It helps peak up weak signals in the 90 and 120 meter bands.

If anyone knows of a simple to build,random wire tuner for the MW band,I'd be very interested in hearing about it. A tunable BOG for MW could have a lot of dx potential.

[thechoat]

Sky loop about 400' long and i love it great signals and low noise best ive tried so far

[BoomboxDX]

For SW, I use an indoor random wire.  I had an outdoor 100 ft. wire but it blew down a few years ago, and the tree had to be removed soon afterwards.  I recently strung a low 150 ft. wire, but right now that's still an experiment.

For MW, I use a Radio Shack loop, a Select-A-Tenna, and a 2 ft. homemade spiral loop (with a 4 ft. spiral loop in storage).

[bret]

I use an 80m doublet (130') suspended from a live oak. I feed it with 450ohm ladder line to a 4:1 4kw balun right outside the shack. A short rg8 jumper is my feed through to the tuner and radio. A buddy and I built a t2fd today - a side by side test will be forthcoming.

[skeezix]

Been using a G5RV for many years, but as of late it seems to be picking up a ton of RFI. Not sure if something has gone wrong with it or neighbors with noisy electronics.

Also have a 100' random wire for another receiver while I'm not hanging out near the coax for G5RV. That seems to work well enough, since it runs from the back porch to the back yard.

Thinking about the Wellbrook, but a bit expensive. Recently read about the PA0RDT "mini-whip." Ordered some parts to make one and going to give it a try and see how well it works. Reports are favorable.  If it does work as well as people say, then will make a bunch of these for the various receivers, and even one for the car (have a Sony AM/FM/SW receiver in there).

[Zane]

Not sure where my Ewe fits in on this list Chris.

Z

[desmoface]

+1

Mine is about 275ft long, tuned to be resonant on the 80 meter ham bands.  Works great, lasts long time.

Steve

Sky loop about 400' long and i love it great signals and low noise best ive tried so far

[Tom S]

My primary SWL antenna is a random wire about 150 feet long or so fed through a 9:1 balun.  It's in kind of an inverted-U fashion.  The weatherproof box holding the balun is about 15 ft. up the side of the garage just under the eave, and from there one side of the balun transformer goes straight down to ground, and the other goes up about 10-15 feet near the top of a tree, then over about 100 feet to another tree, fed through a pulley and down about 20-25 feet with a window weight providing ballast.

For years I used a 5 band ham trap vertical which worked well until we moved, when the spot I chose for it on the north side of the house where the big power lines run caused quite a bit of noise to overpower all but the strongest signals on the bands.  I took the vertical down when I put the random wire up.  I've been thinking about putting the vertical back up next to the garage and building a switch box to choose between the wire, the vertical, or both.  Still not sure if I'm going to do that or not, but I still have the vertical laying idle behind the garage.

For our covered patio, I have a 50' end fed antenna for general SWL/QRP ham use. 

[Tom S]

OK this weekend I put the vertical back up and built the switchbox.  Details in the thread I started about it.

[Northwest Radio]

Off center fed Dipole (Windom) is my main SWL. It is 173' in length and up around 50'. I had to cut in half for my new location. It was double that. <Cry>  
Some years back when I had more room I used a pair of Bobtail Curtains. INCREDIBLE USE OF WIRE!!

[Billy the Mountain]

Interesting that you put T2FD as a choice.  I had a T2FD up for years--it's a great aerial.  When I built it I was young and stupid, and built it to withstand The Inquisition (or whatever)--12 ga. solid copper wire, PVC spreaders, etc. etc.

Were I to build another one, it would be much lighter.  It's a nice, quiet, broadband aerial, and worked well with my R390/A.  Ah, those were the days, decoding TASS RTTY in EE out of Cuba. . .

For now, it's the 40m dipole outside at 50' and a 20m magnetic loop in the attic. . .

[Sealord]

DX Engineering 8 circle array

[Jhkayakr]

Par end fedz oriented east-west
Short long wire oriented north-south

[vk3fz]

for the bc bands i use an old frizel fd-4 off center fed
for ham  tet emtron te 56  5 element 6 bands

[L Bo]

I use a 9" loop for MW and a long wire for SW. I am restricted to keeping an antenna indoors (HOA) and looking to build a "Carpet Loop Antenna" for better SW. If anyone has feedback or has built one please share. Thanks