I would like to put up a relatively large loop antenna to cover all the HF bands. I have sloping terrain and geographically in a slight "bowl" with hills and/or ridges in many directions.
If I stick with the trees on the high part of my property, it looks like I could get somewhere around 400 ft. of wire up perhaps 25ft. high on average.
Or, I could extend the loop to the lower end of my property, where I at have some arbor vitae that I can almost see over when standing on my porch — this would allow me to get over 500ft but most of that extra would be lower.
My plan is to use a tuner in the house with around 20ft. of coax running to a balun outside, so I'm wondering what sort of tradeoffs I should consider here.
- Is it better for a large horizontal loop to be 10ft higher on average, or 100ft longer total? Ignoring other factors, how would loop diameter and height (and slant!) affect the radiation pattern?
- If I can't get an exact resonance on 160m, should I aim for some other particular length of wire (perhaps optimizing the higher bands, or to get some OCF-style impedance compromise), or just string from tree to tree around the lot and let the tuner deal with it?