Loop antennas need to be rotated?
Indoors or outdoors?
Active or passive?
Feed line?
What should I try to hear on LW? Euro broadcast,
beacons?
Best time of day, year to listen?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks, Don, flexoman61
These are some general comments, which pertain to LW mainly:
Chris is right; a 100 foot longwire should be able to hear a lot.
Unless you live in an electrically quiet house, the loop should be outdoors. The amount of RFI at LW frequencies in the typical house is generally quite high. The ability of a loop to depress RFI from a given direction is generally quite good, but noise tends to come from a number of sources within a house.
A loop which is not on a rotator can be very useful (it can always be swung around by hand to a target area), but having one on a rotator enables you to tap into the full potential of the loop.
Active or passive? If you are rolling your own, its your call. If you are purchasing a loop (such as a Wellbrook or Pixel SML) then it will be active. BTW, the Wellbrook is a pretty good loop at LF.
Feedline: any good quality 50 or 75 ohm coax will generally have pretty low loss down at LF. I use 75 ohm direct burial rated coax for most of my antenna runs.
I wouldn't invest a lot of money in an antenna if you were primarily interested in Euro broadcast; those are dropping like flies. There are still a large number of LW beacons around (and very many difficult catches), even tho there is some decommissioning. Generally best listening is from an hour or two after your local sundown until sun up, and late fall to early spring is the main season; thunderstorm noise can propagate long distance, and DX is hard in the summer. More local beacons (within ~200 miles) can generally be well heard year round, some all day long.
Hope this helps!