On Jan 22, 8:26*pm, "christofire" wrote:


Perhaps the difference is that what I described before was for use with
broadcast signals (following the topic of the OP), in which case short and
small antennas can be used for measurement purposes within areas provided
with adequate (or nearly adequate) field strength, whereas in amateur radio
applications the tendency would be to use as large an antenna as possible,
to maximise the possible range.

Chris

No real difference. The objective is improving the s/n ratio.
With any kind of array the main improvement is going to be
from a directive pattern and the use of nulls. Only if you had
a very close noise source might it be useful to use the properties
of the small loops, etc to reduce reception of the magnetic field.
There is a small increase in overall s/n ratio as you increase the
size of a small loop, but it's not anything earthshaking.
In the city, for all practical purposes my 16 inch round loop
has just about as good a usable s/n ratio as my larger
44 inch per side diamond loop.
You have to get into a low noise environment to really take advantage
of the small benefits of a larger loop.
IE: in the dead of the winter it will be more useful than in the
noisy
summer.
On those low frequencies, it doesn't take much to get to the
saturation point where adding "more" really doesn't do much to
improve the s/n ratio.
As mentioned before, if you are tuned to a dead frequency and
you can hear the atmospheric noise, you are already basically
to the point where adding "more" is not going to help.
At that stage only changing the pattern will improve s/n ratio.
And on MW, it's usually the nulls that are used, vs the gain
in a certain direction.