Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Chris Smolinski, who shared the screen shot above of a “YouLoop” being sold by a vendor on eBay.
While the Airspy YouLoop is based on a public domain noise-cancelling passive loop design that dates back decades (a.k.a. the Moebius loop antenna) buyers should note that many of the “YouLoop” antennas on eBay are not manufactured by Airspy. The product titles are misleading in this regard:
The RTL-SDR Blog does sell the original Airspy YouLoops on eBay for $34.95 shipped (and, as you can see above, they seem to pop up first in the search results).
Many of the other loops being marketed as “YouLoops” on eBay cost around $23.00-25.00 shipped. About $10 less, but there’s no guarantee the toroid windings, for example, will have the same specs as the original YouLoop.
It’s easy to spot the YouLoop copies because the cross over and toroid enclosures are much larger than those of the authentic AirSpy YouLoop:
Compared with the Airspy YouLoop:
Airspy doesn’t own a patent for the YouLoop (indeed, they even suggest homebrewing one) so this isn’t a clone. Rather, buyers should simply be aware that, as far as I know, the only authentic new YouLoops are being sold on eBay by the RTL-SDR blog.
I started out building a few of my own YouLoops using some BN-73-302 ferrites and VGA cable ferrites, then bought what I already knew was a knockoff from eBay, as I also wanted to compare.
The balun and crossover boxes were slightly larger and used a different construction technique using SMA connectors with cables leading to small interface PCBs, but works just the same.
The one I purchased is also using a microscopic-sized ferrite which just shows that the knockoffs and “real” ones are both being built to a price point.
I don’t know how many factories make these wound ferrites, but my guess is they are all from the same bin in China.
I ultimately just replaced the balun in that box with one of my own 4-turn 1:1 baluns I wound myself using a BN-73-302 and larger gauge magnet wire.
Just for fun I built another scrap-YouLoop using that tiny eBay balun and it also works like that.
the design seems to be fairly tolerant of the ferrite being used.
The one I made following some of the posts here seems to work OK. It would be interesting to see some sort of performance comparison between the Airspy one and the clone. I’d consider buying an Airspy one is there were a reputable dealer in the US I could get one from.
Yes they arèn`t originals, we know, but on Aliexpress they cost half as much as the original and they comes with a 6 metre cable.
As gratbob said, it would be very interesting a side to side comparison of their perfomance.
Greetings.
the problem with those “chinese” models is that the re’s no info about the kind of transformer and core used, and this ciuld result in sub optimal if not poor performance
I made one from the article that was linked here 😉 It was so simple…
Surprisingly , it works really well with my XHDATA D-808, which I did not expect! . Signal strength is less than a vertical antenna in the back yard, but the noise level is waaay less.
Hi Neil, how did you adapt the 50 ohm coax to the high impedance input of the D808 ?
The external antenna input of the D-808 isn’t particularly high impedance – I haven’t measured it, but it certainly behaves during alignment and spec-testing like a middling-low impedance. Somewhere in the 50~200 ohms nominal range, and not too objectionably reactive anywhere across the radio’s SW range, is my general impression.
“the only thing the Chinese have failed to copy from world commerce is intellectual property ethics”
Time for Hollywood et al to pay it’s fair share of an intellectual property tax
Got mine from airspy.us. A lot of deception on ebay. Another example is ordering new old stock of Tecsun pl-660, if you get it from anon.co storefront, they promise to send the latest 2019 production model. Other sellers still in stock do not promise that.