Well decided to put up my good old trusty 7 band OCF dipole that i made a while back. I got it up the highest i have ever gotten it, the apex at 45ft and the legs slopping in an inverted V.  Took me most of Sat. and that evening i stayed up late playing radio, i had it hooked up thru an antenna switch with my 80 meter horizontal loop that is 35 ft. off the ground.  It did not matter what band or what freq. i was on the loop pulled in the strongest signal and was also heard on the loop when i could not be heard on the dipole, even when the dipole had much better SWR reading than the loop.  Well spent all sunday taking it back down , will be my portable or emergency antenna.

This gives me the warm and fuzzies about my antenna decisions at my new station.  I've got a OCFD up right now but I've got the wire and rope for an 80m loop sitting in the shack awaiting free time to build.  I need to come up with a feeding plan and insulators. How are you feeding your loop?  I can take the 4:1 balun off the OCFD or I can feed it direct off coax with an RF choke.  I think I'm going to use PVC elbows for corner insulators.  What say you?

That matches what I typically see.  The 160m & 80m full wave horizontal loops almost always produce better reception than the other antenna types that are up (fan dipole, horizontal dipole &  vertical).  It is pretty rare when one of the non-loops has an edge (but I have seen it happen).  

Both my FWL's have home-brew 4" open wire ladder line run to their feed point, then transition to a coax connection for the radio via a current balun (with about 3' of coax for the 160m and about 35' of coax for the 80m).  I use modified Zareba corner insulators at my pull points to let the wire move easily.

Nick

Im using a 4 to 1 balun fed with coax and an rf choke , corners are insulated with pvc

Thanks guys :)  I'm going to go the coax/balun route and if I don't like the results I'll experiment with open wire.  I think this FWL paired with a 43' vertical will be my long term setup for HF at home.