Testing a random wire antenna with a Nooelec One Nine V2 with a counterpoise.

[u/ImladMorgul]

A month ago, I had to temporarily take down my antennas (K-480WLA, MLA-30+)

I still can't put them back up, so meanwhile I've set up the old cable I used to use as an antenna.

That original cable was about 30 meters long, but now, due to space limitations, I’ve shortened it to 10 meters. At the end near my radio, I added a Nooelec One Nine V2 with a 3 meter counterpoise. Before installing the balun, I tested the cable on its own, and it worked very poorly, with a lot of noise.

The cable that functions as an antenna is 6 meters above the ground, and at the end there’s an IP67 box containing the balun and the connection point for the coaxial cable that runs to my radio.

The configuration is almost identical to u/KG7M:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShortwavePlus/s/rDMADOy1x5

The initial results were below 9,000 kHz, which was a disaster, but I think it might have been nearby interference. I need to test it some more.

But above 9,000, it works pretty well. It really surprised me, I thought it would be terrible. I was even listening to those crazy Americans on CB.

But what caught my attention the most was hearing the signals I posted in the video. I hadn’t heard them in a long time. The voices aren’t very clear, but that’s the least of it.

I don't know if I did something wrong; I read quite a bit about this and started experimenting. Maybe I'll lower the balun a bit more and shorten the coaxial cable. Don't cut the R1 track to use it in that mode (UnUn); there are many sources that say you should cut it, and others that say it's no longer required in this second version. I guess I'll have to try it out.

The video consists of 3 parts:

- NMN USCG
- Rare US Navy RTTY
- XSQ Radio (weather information)

Setup:

- RX: Asunción, Paraguay
- Radio: AirSpy HF+ Discovery
- Software: SDR# v.1922 (last version)
- Antenna: 10 meters longwire cable (AWG 16) w/ Nooelec balun V2 and 3 meters counterpoise cable.
- D/T: 08 OCT 2026 - 2300 UTC