Gradually becoming one with the (obscenely high S-7, gotta love SWLing in the city
) noise floor as of 0323 UTC.
Yup, know wut ya mean. If I hadn't switch to a homebrewed indoor magnetic loop I'd probably have given up on SWL by now.
If I'm recalling correctly, the only flaw with that Doty antenna design was the TV "balun" being a less than ideal match for HF. But I'm using a typical cannister type TV balun for my magloop and it works ok, even if it's not ideal.
Take a peek at the
KR1ST loop design. Several folks have reported good results with that as a compromise indoor antenna for dealing with typical manmade RFI.
My loop is somewhat similar but made from coaxial cable rather than copper tubing. It's based on a Joe Carr design I already had in one of his books from the 1990s. Same principle though. I used it as a passive untuned loop for a couple of years and it worked well for certain bands, especially 6600-7500 kHz and the MW AM band, but was pretty much deaf above 10 MHz. But by early this year when propagation tanked it wasn't quite enough so I added an amplified tuner. The original design tended to overload with the amplifier so I adjusted the pickup loop to a much smaller diameter (around 8"-10") and it works just fine. Not as convenient as the untuned loop for bandscanning though.
The other alternative is to just tote a portable on my walks. I often get much better reception in certain low noise zones in my suburban neighborhood.