Indoor antenna HF

[G4YTI]

My home qth is compromised to say the least!
Ground floor flat, small room, no access to outside.
Has anybody managed to produce a hf antenna even nearly half decent for this type of situation?
Nikki

[ch25]

Whatever you put inside it will perform bad. No matter what you buy.

[G4YTI]

That much I know.
But need to try something, can't just sit here looking at a dead rig!

[ch25]

What band(s)? It will narrow selection.
RX only or you want radiate some RF to your brain cells?

If you have manual skills build MFJ-1622 for pennies.
Coil is 2,5 inch diameter, 5 inches long, 50 turns. 1mm wire diameter.

[G4YTI]

Frying some of my brain cells was the hope, at my age there are few left anyway!
Just finished 20m spiral loop. Seems to be receiving ok but very narrrow band width.
Something that covered more than one band would be nice as well. I can always hope.
Have ft857 and mfj manual tuner to play with.

[securityguy]

My home qth is compromised to say the least!
Ground floor flat, small room, no access to outside.
Has anybody managed to produce a hf antenna even nearly half decent for this type of situation?
Nikki

My first post on this forum

I'm amazed nobody has suggested a magloop, great for indoors as you're listening to the magnetic portion of the signal so you will get far less interference. I've worked all over Europe on 40m on mine (using an iCom 705 limited to max of 10 watts).

[G4YTI]

Yes a coax mag loop is on my to do list. Currently working on 40 metre spiral loop. Some promising results. rx only so far.

[Agent 48]

A ground floor flat isn't the worse situation, you'd have outdoor space outside windows with a bit of sky?

You could build something stealthy. Magloop are brilliant but they don't always work that well indoors, they still need free radiating space.

Well done for at least trying because the attitude in today's HAM world is not to bother... in today's world everything works out of the box. An indoor antenna will perform poorly compared with an outdoor antenna but it will still preform nevertheless in some way. If you can make 2 or 3 contacts or even one contact on HF with an indoor antenna without harming your radio "bearing in mind the RF inside the home" then its better than giving up and having nothing at all.

[Agent 48]

The miracle whip antenna... people say they make contacts on it, its almost like magic maybe a better version can be built with a longer whip could work well.