I think we're rapidly approaching the point in this country where people anywhere near urban environments are going to be needing seperate receiving antennas such as a Wellbrook Loop.

Ah, you're possibly in the same "My QTH is bolloxed" boat I was in.

For me it was QRM. At my old house, which is 100 feet from my new house, QRM was a problem - up to S9 on 10m. Here, very little and S0 on 10m. I can drive past the old house and watch the S meter rise then drop.

Having had an OFCOM field engineer round for a PLT complaint I put in, he said there was a source of noise I could do nothing about.

One thought: When driving within the close proximity, say 10ft - 20ft of an overhead powerline, I observe S9 signals drop out of the box, I guess the EMF around the cables is the problem. Is there anything buried in the ground or overhead like that?

Does Lee live on top of a giant copper meteorite that crashed many millions of years ago and now acts as a groundplane below his antenna farm?

Or,he goes around in the middle of the night dosing the ground with a strong saline solution?

The ground beneath his antennas is less disturbed than that of your modern house which probably has half a pallet of wasted bricks and the remains of a broken cement mixer buried in it?

I'm struggling for ideas here Kev but in all fairness that poor location question mark is a bit of a wind up for all of us as by rights the further south and west you go the easier certain contacts should be but listening to a guy in Hungary from here in Dorset the other evening he was pulling in VKs at the same time as W6s and positively racing through the contacts while acknowledging European stations too I sat there chewing the edge of the desk my radio sits on as I could bare here the W6 let alone the VK station.....that having been said I could hear a couple of Indonesian stations last night so all is not lost although I didn't get a chance to work them in the ensuing scrum....this is all on 40 metres on my vertical.

Cheers,Dave.

That's got to have a big impact as basically it would be the same as laying radials on poor ground I would have thought. I wonder how many off cuts of rebar is buried under there as well.

For info: at 10MHz, the "skin depth" in average soil is 4m, in poor soil 12m, and in good soil 1m. At 2MHz you can double those values.

73,
Steve G3TXQ

Sorry its taken me nearly a week to reply as its just taken me a week to realise what mistake I've been making.

I read the graph wrong, lol. No - correction - I read the graph how I wanted to read it. I'd got in my head the trace for the 2WL high dipole was the 1/4 wave vertical.

I'll get me coat.