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<b>Here is concrete evidence that a Part 15 compliant transmitter can be received 1 1/4 miles away if you tell all your listeners to buy this loop. Note NO FCC RULES WERE VIOLATED and if wood be Hobby Broadcasters do as I did and post this to your village’s Facebook page you’ll have plenty of listeners and donations (If you play the right musical format). The Frequency was 1640 Khz and the time was 5:00 on a Friday Night.</b>
I could have brought my other radio but I didn’t have the batteries fully charged as I had been using it as a monitor the whole day. And the fact that it is a little difficult holding the radio to the loop although I could have brought it with me as a demo.
This very same video I posted on the Deltaville Virginia Facebook page. Lots of people who live in my little village go to that Facebook page and thus the word gets out. I have mentioned before that I would do live Demos in person.
I just got a $100 donation a few days ago after I did the homemade Lube demo. The gentleman that actually made the donation I found out lived in Deltaville. And get this he owns several big companies. I have a funny feeling that this gentleman has a project lined up for me because he left an email that he wants to talk to me. I went down to the marina where one of his lady friends are and did the demo for her. This was about 3 miles out which the signal could still sort of be heard but it would give you fatigue after a bit. The farthest I’ve heard it with what I would call listenable Quality is about 2.5 miles out. Again this is using the Terk am Advantage Loop.
It was fun riding along Deltaville with the loop being held outside the window. I had to do that because my car radio the am on it is really crappy. It really gave me some good Insight on my signal coverage with the loop. But I noticed something else when I put the loop down on top of something I had to retune the capacitor my hand evidently changes the capacitance having it near the capacitor and holding the loop so it has to be on top of a table when you tune it.
I have no doubt the word is going to get out because this gentleman was amazed about how good the station is as he said he is not heard anything like that in years and bringing album-oriented Rock back to the masses is part of his project as well.
Yes, If you put the loop on something metal like the roof of the car in your last demo it changes the tuning and you have to retune. It may not work as good also.
My suggestion if it was me is take a small wooden or one of those plastic tables with foldable legs and a portable radio and the Terk Advantage and with the radio sitting on the table demonstrate how it works….a station hardly heard(yours) without and then bring the antenna to the radio and let some other interested people try it.
Get a good location near the stores at a busy time like Saturday afternoon. It seems like an easy thing…no one has to get a certain receiver as just this antenna will probably do the trick with any decent radio all over your town. Good luck!Thanks for sharing your experience and demo via video.
What may happen with this idea for an improved receiver/antenna scheme could be similar to a subscription service where people will be willing to pay to gain access to programming they value with a slight difference being that the hardware expense is reasonable and is a one time only cost.
For example, my wife pays a monthly subscription to a streaming no commercials audio service for which we paid for a receiver and she donates to PBS because she is willing to support and gain access to programming she wants to hear and which is not available through commercial stations locally.
The key is to produce programming which people want and your researching and demonstrating hardware which can make it happen by extending range is a great contribution to the Part 15 community.
Congratulations and keep going!
Neil
Indeed. The key here is bringing the knowledge and existence of easy to use loop antennas to the general public, most of whom would have no idea such a thing exists.
Of course a capacitance coupled, tunable loop antenna has been around since the dawn of radio itself. In the early days it was not uncommon to buy or build a loop antenna to set on top of a receiving set as far back as the 1920’s, to improve, or get any reception at all, of the few stations available back then. Then as we moved into the 30’s and 40’s a typical home radio would have a loop antenna built into the back cover of the radio. This stuck well into the 1950’s. Then transistors came along, and making radios smaller came along, and battery powered radios that fit in your pocket became the thing, and tiny and cheap built in loop stick antennas became the thing. They were still directional but didn’t have the ability to grab nearly as much signal.
Floor model radios in the 30’s through 50’s usually had large loop antennas built into their cabinets. Several even had loop antennas built into rotatable cardboard housings, tubes or boxes, mounted on pivoting axis behind the radio so you could turn the antenna for best reception without having to turn the radio — which was actually a piece of furniture.
The use of loop antennas are still very common in ham and shortwave radio. They were also pretty common on aircraft in the 30’s and 40’s, on a rotatable mount on top of the fuselage so the pilot could rotate to determine the direction a signal was coming from to use for navigation. Most photos of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra clearly show the loop antenna directly above the cockpit.
I built a loop antenna back when I was 10 or 11 years old. With plans from an electronics book for boys, I used a pair of three foot long sticks to make an “X”, in which I cut small grooves in the ends so I could wrap enameled wire 10 or so times around the loop with the wire sitting in the grooves to keep them straight and not criss crossing over each other. A variable capacitor out of an old radio at one end, and tah-dah! I had a tunable loop antenna!
There are many different companies that offer the same basic antenna other than Terk. They are all basically the same thing with somewhat different aesthetics and prices, all of which – including the Terk — have hundreds of positive reviews. Like anything else a users radio and other circumstances will vary giving varying results but generally this type of antenna has always performed very well. There are thousands of plans to build many types of loop antennas available on the ‘net. You can even build them to specific sizes for maximum effectiveness on certain frequencies.
The positives being the loop is very directional so grabs signal from where it is aimed, and at the same time attenuates signals and noise that come at it from different directions. Often these are used more with the intention of nulling noise than they are to grab signal.
Definitely a way to help people listen to an AM Part 15 station without having to buy an expensive or hard to find radio.
It also helps if you choose to listen to a radio built before transistors 🙂
TIB
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