Tony Giacometti wrote in
news:sO2dnUZbkeShCaLanZ2dnUVZ_v2pnZ2d@hawaiiantel. net:

I believe this should work, but for some reason not like I thought it
would.


Tony, I have described a simple untuned loop for field strength
measurement. The article is at
http://www.vk1od.net/SmallUntunedSquareLoop/index.htm . The sensitivity
of the loop is sufficient that external noise on 3.6MHz is much greater
than the receiver internal noise, ie S/N of signals on the band will be
about as good as they can be, a higher gain antenna will increase the S
meter reading, but not improve S/N ignoring the effects of noise blankers
and noise reduction. The predicted performance has been confirmed by
comparison to a calibrated EMC measurement loop.

The purpose of tuning a loop is preselection and / or better impedance
matching to improve gain (by reducing loss).

The purpose of shielding a loop is for better balance to achieve deeper
nulls, but shielding isn't the only way, nor the best way necessarily.
Roy mentioned that.

Try a simple untuned loop, the balun is REAL important (for deep nulls),
see how it works then see if you can get the improved version to work. It
is questionable whether the shielded loop construction is a real
improvement, it brings some loss elements (the s/c stub loss, the line
loss in the other half the loop) to the design, losses that be worse than
a balun.

Owen