A few gov and private party studies on buried hf antennas showed a dipole was efficient enough to be useful and certainly easier to deploy than a loop. They typically buried the antenna only a few inches below the surface, and used RG8 sans shield (meaning insulation and center conductor only) as the elements, waterproofing as needed. As you may have guessed these were EMP-related studies; can't be blown over if it's not above ground to begin with. Speaking of buried antennas, tests on hf within mine shafts showed some interesting properties, think it was a quartz mine so very dielectric, worked very well on 80 and 40, The ARRL antenna handbooks have a lot of these tests if you're interested
As for log types, special forces have long been searching for an antenna that was low profile with few showing any real promise. Those that do show some promise are fantastically expensive and are literally huge in area covered, at least for a wire antenna.
Here's one example;
http://www.hflink.com/antenna/elpa/The Shirley and Jamaica Antenna has been suggested as workable;
http://arrl-ohio.org/SEC/nvis/nvis.pdfAs for hobbyist logs, I suspect ones with a single conductor, meaning no multiconductor phone wire, will be best, with as much wire on the ground as can be made to fit for reasons of gain. I suspect multiconductor wire will have odd capacitance effects and other undesireables as with using cat cable as an antenna - the pairs are specifically twisted so as not to interfere with each other signalwise.
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