Apartment dwellers and antenna experimenters might like to try this antenna.
It is a simple loop antenna that is not very big , but it works very well.




The construction is extremely straight forward and at the most will cost you about 10 dollars.

The 1 meter sided square loop is broken at the top and an air spaced variable capacitor is used for tuning.




At the bottom a simple pick up loop is taped to the main loop.
No direct electrical connection is made to the main loop.
The size of the pickup loop is not critical for receiving purposes , mine was made from about 30 to 40cm of wire.




The tuning capacitor I used was one got off eBay from Russia.
It has an inbuilt reduction drive which is VERY handy as this loop tunes sharp. !!
The value isn't extremely critical , but it is around 50 to 200pF.

In operation the loop shows a deep null off to the side , just the thing to knock out a strong SW or undesirable stations on the frequency you want to listen on.

Performance rivals many much larger non-resonant antennas and is lower in noise. (but not super low noise)

To use it,  set your RX to the desired meter band or frequency and adjust the capacitor for maximum noise, or signal strength.
You will find that the tuning capacitor needs to be adjusted quite precisely for maximum signal strength.
This is also great if you have strong out of band interference as it kills that dead.

My loop tunes from about 5MHz to 18MHz (frequencies outside this range not tried)


If you only ever try and make one loop antenna , try this , it works.