This is one fantastic antenna with a remote tuner. After using a vertical for many years, I was concerned about the loop’s narrow bandwidth and wondered if I’d be incessantly tuning. My concerns would be answered after a few week’s lead time waiting on the antenna.

It arrived nicely packed, in perfect shape, and I had it assembled in less than 20 minutes. It’s a very easy build onto a 5′ aluminum pole with a lightweight rotor that I purchased for this project. After all cabling was attached to the loop, tuner, and rotor, I applied the supplied power unit to the remote control and listened to the plates of the capacitor open and close successfully as I pressed the remote control’s red and green buttons. Connectors were weatherproofed and onto the roof it went.

I placed my IC-7300 on 20 meters and attempted to tune the loop to resonance. The controller has a potentiometer on the top that varies the tuning speed. Doing what any other red-blooded man would do, I turned the pot all the way to the right and started tuning. Don’t do that. I went back and forth a few times missing the resonant point because it goes so fast. The pot was turned back to mid-dial and I began to tune, watching my waterfall. As you reach your frequency, you will hear the noise level come up and the waterfall will “brighten”. In my case, I could also see a slight “arching” in the noise floor where the resonance was. This is when I decided to send a carrier and view the SWR and touch it up. For the Icom, SOTABEAMS makes a Click2Tune kit (https://www.sotabeams.co.uk/click2tune-for-icom-kit-or-built) that allows the radio to key-up at low power, thus eliminating the need to increase and decrease power to tune. I believe other radios have this functionality built-in. On 10-40 meters I was able to tune the antenna until the SWR was almost flat. On 20 meters, where SWR is the highest, it’s only 1.3:1. I’m very impressed. I changed the dial to 10 meters and tuned to where there were some DX calls and I jumped into the pileups. Europe, Central, and South America returned my calls with no issues using 100w on my end. The amount of times I needed to tune was not an issue for me as the bandwidth was pleasantly wide for a loop.

In my case, when the speed knob was adjusted to slow down the tuner, I noticed an introduction of what appeared to be DC noise on the spectrum. To mitigate that, I put a mix 31 ferrite on the control cable that goes up to the tuner. It knocked out most of the noise and tuning is easy.

In conclusion, I am very satisfied with this antenna. It quiets the band, you can use the slight null on the sides to mitigate a noise source, and its size accommodates HOA concerns, if that is an issue. Whenever I had any questions, the owner Steve personally answered them and I never felt rushed. The customer service is second to none. They stand by their products.

73,
Chris, W4LUC