Hey kids, it's finally on the air..My electrician ran my coax and the
loop is up and running..She's cut for 75/80 and I originally came up
with about 260 ft of wire but I must have measured wrong cause she
show's the lowest swr of ~1.7 to 1 at around 3650..my calculations
showed it should have been around 3850...Oh well, maybe its because
it's not really as high as it should be??..I noticed after a good rain there
appeared to be a lot of slack in one area..could be that the wire stretched a
bit?? It's 13 gauge 19 strand copper clad steel so I was hoping stretch would
be minimal..Oh well..

Anyway, I'm just running straight coax with no balun (except for
several loops of coax at the feed point) so I'm pleased so far with
the swr readings..As a plus, my old kenwood ts450sat tunes her up on
most of the bands without the use of my outboard tuner..although I
will use the outboard tuner to get it close...

Anyway, she plays nice on 80..signals that were barely readable on my
butternut vertical were 20 over on the loop..but that was to be
expected I guess? Suprisingly, the vertical seems to work a little
better on 40..I say "seems" because the static noise was a little
higher on the vertical and the qso I had with a friend about 10 miles
away confirmed that the vertical was a few s units stronger..he was
running a dipole so I would have thought that the loop would have
been stronger as its also horizonitaly polarized..

Same with the upper hf bands(10-20)..seems to be a little
more noise in the recieve with the vertical..but the bands were in
pretty bad shape so It could be that the loop is just that much
quieter than the vertical..time will tell..

Thanks to the group for all the advice/help during the construction phase, it's
definitely paid off..73's

Steve
kb8viv