Hi Larry

You are talking about a shielded magloop rather than a full wave length
single quad loop...

They exhibit reasonable performance for their size and are very quiet.
ie the signal to noise is often better on the magloop than a larger
antenna. I have seen claims that the signal strength is maybe 2 S points
lower but the noise is 5 S points lower.

I have heard of configurations where a dipole is used for TX and a
magloop for RX.

The at antenna tuning makes for less chance of a strong nearby signal
desensitizing your RX. The downside of that is that you have to have
some method of doing this remote tuning. Bandwidths in the order of
20-30khz on 80m are not uncommon.

They can be built for 2:1 or 3:1 frequency coverage range. I have no
idea how the performance changes at the far end.

I actually havent built one weak grin

Hope this helps.

Cheers Bob W5/VK2YQA

larry wrote:
this popularity....What charateristics, besides seemingly not needing as
much geography to need to put up, does this antenna have that make is so
appealing?