Tag Archives: Small Unidirectional Loop Antenna (SULA)

Born in the ER: Andrew’s portable SULA antenna

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Andrew (VK2ZRK), who writes:

Just thought I would share some pics of my SULA build which I constructed in the Emergency department’s antenna building section in between catastrophies here in Australia.

I built it out of 8mm fibreglass tube from a kite supply, 8mm kite nocks, 13mm equal cross irrigation fitting and lots of double wall glue lined heat shrink. The 8mm tube with a short bit of heat shrink is a slip fit into the id of the 13mm equal cross which I secured with more heat shrink.

I then cut the frame to length allowing for the length of the kite nocks. I secured the kite nocks with more heat shrink. I then soldered the resister to 2 lengths of Davis RF 12g antenna wire and fed this through the kite nocks terminating it at the nooelec balun on the opposite side to the resistor.

I think it worked out well. It is very light. I built it to use with my SDRPlay RSPdx.

Thank you to everyone involved in the design process and for providing it to the swling.com community.

Cheers
Andrew VK2ZRK

In all the years I’ve been hosting the SWLing Post, I can safely say that we’ve never featured an antenna constructed in an Emergency Department of a hospital. Thank you, Andrew!

The feedback from the SULA antenna build has been phenomenal. The three-part series detailing the SULA antenna from concept to build was the most popular of 2022 on the SWLing Post

Thank you for sharing the photos of your antenna. What a professional job, Andrew!

Readers, if you’d like to learn more about the SULA antenna, check out this three-part series–a collaboration between the amazing Grayhat and 13dka.

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Small Unidirectional Loop Antenna (SULA) Part 3: Questions & Answers

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor extraordinaire, 13dka, who brings us Part Two of a three part series about the new SULA homebrew antenna project. This first article describes this affordable antenna and demonstrates its unique reception properties. The second article focuses on construction notes. This third and final article will essentially be a Q&A about the SULA antenna. 

This wideband unidirectional antenna is an outstanding and innovative development for the portable DXer. I love the fact that it came to fruition via a collaboration between Grayhat and 13dka: two amazing gents and radio ambassadors on our SWLing.net discussion board and here on the SWLing Post. So many thanks to both of them!

Please enjoy and share Part 3:


Part 3: SULA Q&A

by 13dka

Q: Where can I ask questions, discuss all aspects of the the SULA or collaborate in its further development?

A: There is a thread dedicated to the SULA in the new SWLing.com message board: https://swling.net/viewtopic.php?t=55

Q: Since the antenna is “lossy”, what’s the point of having a “beam”?

A: The answer is once again “SNR”: First off, remember that the LNA is there to make up for most of the losses. Secondly, this is all about the noise pickup, 20dB less gain/more losses outside the main lobe means also a reduction of atmospheric/cosmic/whatnot QRN and of course everything manmade from all these sides. The wide horizontal lobe is more or less one hemisphere horizontally, but the flat-ish vertical pattern makes that only a slice of it. In other words, there will be less QRN and QRM pickup from the back and the top. The idea is that the SNR will ideally increase more than the preamp’s noise figure will cost and it often sounds like this is what actually happens. Of course it’s also nice that you can turn an unwanted signal down using the more or less pronounced notch in the backside pattern up to 21 MHz – also very helpful for direction finding.

Q: Do I need a rotor?

A: It depends. If you are one of the lucky few still having a low-QRM-environment at home and you want to put it in the backyard, you really may want to be able to turn it remotely. If you’re using it portable you can simply rotate the mast manually. If you have local QRM or can’t mount it very far away from your or other houses, you may want to rotate the back of the antenna towards that source, leave it at that position forever and enjoy what’s coming in on the pretty wide main lobe of the antenna. The horizontal lobe covers more or less half of the horizon, depending on your stations of interest and location you could get away with never turning the antenna at all.

Q: Is it better than the XYZ loop?

A: Hey, that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you! 🙂 Even though the SULA is very similar in appearance and performance to a good SML working in ideal (ground conductivity) conditions, the SULA is a pretty different animal with a different behavior: Regular small loops, besides being bidirectional, can lose quite a bit of their low angle sensitivity over “poor” ground while the SULA is supposed to be retaining its properties better over any type of ground. Also, while many SMLs are tuned for VLF through the lower portion of the shortwave, the SULA complements those with quite uniform (good) properties up to 30 MHz and beyond.

Q: I have an end-fed random wire or dipole strung up from the house to a tree etc. – can the SULA beat that?

A: That’s quite possible. To get low takeoff angles from horizontal wire antennas you need to string them up at least 1/2 wavelength high, that’s 20m/66ft on 40/41m, 10m/33ft on 20m and so on. If you can’t do that, the SULA may be your ticket to listen farther beyond the horizon. Also, wire antennas are often strung up to match space restrictions or avoid QRM vectors and that way you may end up with some directionality in directions you don’t want, or no directionality at all when the wire is too low. Another noteworthy point is the ground: For most horizontal antennas, better ground means a considerable higher takeoff angle so the dipole needs even more height for low angles. The SULA’s takeoff angle benefits a little from the better ground and only gets a little worse over poor ground.

Q: Do I really need an LNA?

A: I hope so? Of course it depends… if you are going to try this antenna in a very noisy environment, the LNA may have little to no benefit. The noise is limiting your “radio horizon” to very loud signals anyway and for those you may not need an LNA, ever. On the other hand, the antenna is very lossy and in a quiet environment where noise is not an issue at all, weak signals may drop below the sensitivity threshold of your receiver without the LNA. The less noise you have, the more you’ll be able to benefit from an LNA. You will also need one when your radio isn’t all that sensitive, similar to the requirements to run a YouLoop. Andrew kept the loop impedance as constant as possible in order to allow any low impedance coax preamp to work behind the Balun. Any LNA with 20dB of gain should do, as per usual, better stuff may bring better results.

Among the sparse offers for decent shortwave LNAs, the NooElec LANA HF seems to be the only decent LNA sold via Amazon. It’s comparatively low-cost and unlike the other offers on Amazon, ready to be powered via Bias-T or even via Micro-USB and therefore happy with 5V. Since I also had the balun from the same company I could simply connect that all with a couple of these cute little SMA plumbing bits and it worked. The downside is its unknown but perceivably low resilience against intermodulation (low 3rd-order intercept point), this is usually not a problem with such a small loop but it can be in the presence of nearby transmitters.

If you do have nearby transmitters and don’t mind sourcing an LNA from Europe, Andrew recently pointed me to preamps from here. They offer a moderately priced preamp with a 2N5109 transistor (based on the W7IUV design) for a high IP3 value and low noise, which is also available in PCB-only and fully assembled versions including a compartment. They also offer Bias-T boxes.

Q: What is special/different about this antenna? There are already very similar designs!

A: It’s supposed to be simpler and more compact/portable, and it seems to deliver more consistent results over the entire coverage range in different usage environments than similar designs. The SULA was designed to be made with things that are particularly easy to obtain, or which were already obtained — many of us SWLs have some of that Nooelec stuff in our drawer anyway, even when (or because) we’re not habitual antenna builders and balun winders. Now making a better balun and buying a better preamp is not hard and could even bring better results but the point is that you don’t have to. In summary, this is not meant to be a miracle antenna, just number of compromises re-arranged to create a particularly uncomplicated, small, unidirectional loop antenna that aims for DX, for apartment dwellers and DX nomads like me.

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Small Unidirectional Loop Antenna (SULA) Part 2: Construction Notes

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor extraordinaire, 13dka, who brings us Part Two of a three part series about the new SULA homebrew antenna project. This first article describes this affordable antenna and demonstrates its unique reception properties. This second article focuses on construction notes. The third and final article will essentially be a Q&A about the SULA antenna. All articles will eventually link to each other once published.

This wideband unidirectional antenna is an outstanding and innovative development for the portable DXer. I love the fact that it came to fruition via a collaboration between Grayhat and 13dka: two amazing gents and radio ambassadors on our SWLing.net discussion board and here on the SWLing Post. So many thanks to both of them!

Please enjoy and share Part 2:


Part 2: SULA Construction notes

by 13dka

The drawing [above] has all you need to know. You basically need to put up a symmetrical wire diamond starting with a balun at the one end and terminating in a resistor at the other end of the horizontal boom, the sides are supposed to be 76cm/29.92″ long so you need to make yourself some…

Support structure:

I used 0.63″/1.6cm square plastic square tubing/cable duct profiles from the home improvement market to make the support structure. You can use anything non-conductive for that of course, broom sticks, lathes… The plastic profiles I used had the advantage of being in the house and easy to work on with a Dremel-style tool and everything can be assembled using the same self-tapping screws without even drilling. The profiles are held together with 2 screws, for transport I unscrew one of them and put that into an extra “parking” screw hole on the side, then I can collapse the cross for easy fit into the trunk, a rucksack etc.

These profiles are available in different diameters that fit into each other like a telescoping whip. This is useful to make the support structure variable for experiments and to control the loop shape and tension on the wire. The booms end up at 1.075m each, the profiles come in 1m length, so that’s 4 short pieces of the smaller size tube to extend the main booms by 37mm on each side

On the resistor end of the loop that smaller tube isn’t mounted in the “boom” tube but to the side of it in order to keep the wire running straight from the balun box on the other side.

Mast/mounting:

You can use anything non-conductive to bring it up to height. On second thought that is indeed bad news if you were planning on putting that up on your metal mast…and we have no data on what happens when you do it anyway. I don’t know if the smallest (4m) telescoping fiberglass poles would suffice for portable operation, but I’m a fan of just using the big lower segments of my 10m “HD” mast for the stiffness they give me (3 segments for the height, the 4th collapsed into in the base segment for easy rotation). Telescoping masts also give you easy control over…

Height:

The published patterns are for 3m/10′ feedpoint height over “average” ground. Increasing height further has no expectable advantage, instead it will deteriorate the favorable directional pattern of the loop. Flying it lower, or even a lot lower in windy weather on the other hand is causing a surprisingly moderate hit on performance.

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Introducing the amazing SULA: An affordable unidirectional DX-grade loop antenna that you can build!

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor extraordinaire, 13dka, who brings us a three part series about the new SULA homebrew antenna project. This first article describes this affordable antenna and demonstrates its unique reception properties. The second article will focus on construction notes. The third and final article will essentially be a Q&A about the SULA antenna. All articles will eventually link to each other once published.

This wideband unidirectional antenna is an outstanding and innovative development for the portable DXer. I love the fact that it came to fruition via a collaboration between Grayhat and 13dka: two amazing gents and radio ambassadors on our SWLing.net discussion board and here on the SWLing Post. So many thanks to both of them!

Please enjoy and share SULA Part 1:


Introducing the Small Unidirectional Loop Antenna (SULA) 1-30MHz

A small and simple, unidirectional and DX-capable loop “beam” for SWLs!

by 13dka

In early June, Andrew (grayhat), SWLing Post‘s resident antenna wizard suggested a variation of the “cardioid loop” on the SWLing Post message board: The original “cardioid loop” is a small loop receiving antenna deriving its name from a cardioid shaped (unidirectional) radiation footprint. The design is strikingly simple but it has a few downsides: It relies on a custom preamp, it needs a ground rod to work and it is unidirectional only up to 8 MHz.

Andrew’s version had the components all shuffled around and it did not only lose the ground rod, it also promised a nice cardioid pattern over the entire shortwave, from a small, diamond shaped loop. Wait…what? It can be made using parts available on Amazon and your DIY store:

You need some 3m wire and PVC tubes to create a support structure to hold the wire, a 530 Ohm resistor and a 9:1 balun like the popular “NooElec One Nine”. Since it’s a “lossy” design, adding a generic LNA like the NooElec “LANA HF” would help getting most out of it. When you put that all together you have what sounds like an old shortwave listener’s dream: a small, portable, tangible, and completely practical allband shortwave reception beam antenna with some more convenient properties on top, for example, it is a bit afraid of heights.

That sounded both interesting and plain crazy, but the .nec files Andrew posted were clearly saying that this antenna is a thing now. Unfortunately Andrew suffered a little injury that kept him from making one of those right away, I on the other hand had almost all the needed parts in a drawer so I ended up making a prototype and putting it through some of its paces, with Andrew changing the design and me changing the actual antenna accordingly, then mounting it upside down. Let me show you around:

  •  Small, diamond shaped wire loop (with 76cm/29.92″ sides), needing as little space as most other small loops.
  • Unidirectional with a ~160° wide “beam” and one pronounced minimum with a front/back-ratio of typically 20dB over the entire reception range 1-30MHz.
  • Moderate height requirements: It works best up to 3m/10′ above ground, where it gives you…
  • …a main lobe with a convenient flat takeoff angle for DX
  • Antenna is comparatively insensitive to ground quality/conductivity.
  • Wideband design, works best on shortwave and is pretty good up to 70cm.

A functional small beam antenna for shortwave reception that’s just as small and possibly even more lightweight (prototype:~250g/9oz) than your regular SML, that can be easily made out of easy to obtain parts and easily carried around for mobile/portable DXing and due to its cardioid shaped directional pattern also for direction finding, a “tactical” antenna that’s also doing DX? Unlike conventional, Yagi-Uda or wire beams it can achieve a low takeoff angle at only 3m/10ft height or less, the front/back ratio is typically better than that of a 3-element Yagi, with a particularly useful horizontal pattern shape. That it’s rather indifferent to soil quality could mean that more people get to reproduce the good results and being a real wideband antenna is making the SULA an interesting companion for multiband radios and SDRs. Really? A miracle antenna? Is it that time of year again? If I had a dollar for every….

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