I hear of operators quite often that need an antenna for HF, but live in a restricted subdivision. This means they cannot have obvious antennas, obviously! I hear a lot of advice, most are geared toward a dipole in the attic or a flag pole vertical.

All systems have there unique pros and cons. But I recall seeing an operator that encircled his roof with wire and made a loop from it. I searched and searched, but could not find the article agian. Well, being the tinkerer that I am and having the supplies I needed, I decided to build the "hidden house loop", test it on the air and post it if the results were promising.

As you may guess, since you are reading this the results must have been good. Good enough to go through the trouble of building and posting the article. The formula for a loop antenna is 1005/Freq in Mhz = length in feet. For 40m, that is 143.5 feet of wire.

We live in a fairly small house with a typical roof, the house is 40ft wide and 24ft long, giving a 136ft parameter. Include the slope of the roof to follow and I guess it would be about the 143 feet or so needed for a 40m loop.

My attack plan for the project is pretty much, "build it like a doublet and work it!" That is, have the antenna at least resonant on the target band, feed it with balanced line and work it multiband. That was the desired outcome anyway. So I did just that. I encircled the roof with #14 insulated stranded and brought it back to 25ft of 300ohm twinlead from Radio Shack. I took that to my home brew 4:1 air core BALUN, coax back to the shack (abt 20ft), ran it though an LDG Z-100 and started tuning on 40m.

Holy cow, I do not think Ive ever built an antenna that tuned this low... Abt 1.2:1! All of 40m tunes up. So I check the other bands and 40m-10m tunes up very nicely. So I try 80m... Keeping in mind the antenna is 1/2 the length needed for an 80m loop I didnt expect much, however it did tune all of 80m very nicely. That does not mean much, I learned the hard way... I can tune a dummy load to low SWR, but that doesnt mean it will radiate!

Condx has been horrible the last several days, and over the course of the following days I would test this on several bands to get a feel for how well it performed before posting this article. Results are that on 40m, it typically worked very well usually swapping equal RSTs with other stations (599 for a 599, 579 for a 579, etc.). That usually indicates it is working reasonably well. It was only last night I finally cabbaged up a contact on 80m. I didnt expect much, but I got good reports... however I was about 2 s units down from the other station. Well, that is okay... 80m is at least workable. One contact on 40m SSB gave the the time to go out and switch over to my 90ft Doublet and I was abt 2 s units UP from the hidden house loop.

Several things we need to keep in mind... The idea of this antenna is number 1, stealth. If you can, put up a long wire antenna as high as you can for best results. However, not everyone can do this. 2, be able to work multiband. Both aspects were accomplished. However, RF inside the house was present. No promises how it will interfere with other devices so you will need to keep that in mind. Also keep in mind, this install is only abt 15ft above ground... Getting it to work as well as it did was not expected.