chuck wrote:

FWIW, Tom, "chelton" was probably a typo. There is indeed a Chilton
Loop Antenna at a research facility in the UK. I think the name refers
to the loop used at the Chilton facility, rather than to a particular
antenna design.

There seem to be two possible kinds of "Chilton loop".

One is at www.chilton.com, which is a web-controlled SW radio receiver
located in the USA. This is just a loop of wire in some guy's attic.

The second kind may be related to the ionosondes located at the
Rutherford Appleton Lab, Chilton, UK; and at Port Stanley, Falkland
Islands. These do use crossed loop antennas (as the referenced picture
shows)... but in 25 years living just a few miles down the road,
including 12 years of working right next to RAL and regularly eating
lunch with the hams who work there, I never heard or saw the term
"Chilton loop" until yesterday, right here.

However, I will make some specific inquiries about those loops.


Now if you want something really serious to talk about, those
RAL/Stanley ionosondes are being closed down! The scientists who work
there are horrified, because it would pull the plug on a major
international source of daily data, and terminate the world's
longest-running continuous sequence of ionospheric observations:
http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/wdcc1/news/closure_notice.html

(This actually looks like a clumsy political move to shift the running
costs away from the UK science budget and find some other source of
funding, using the threat of closure as a way to get attention. But
suicide bids of this kind can occasionally go wrong...)


--
73 from Ian GM3SEK 'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek