I think the water conductivity is already pretty good. And yes my other half is a watercolourist - not me!

Nash102030 ... not sure the ground he has is good. I am on heavy soil with a clay substrata 36 inches down. I have a serious 72 inch cooper rod with only a couple of inches left above ground level and a heavy duty clamp. The difference was a s5 noise reduction .

@@robertl.fallin7062 Well dude prolly got tired.. Give'm a break. ;)

We hope to release scanning software in the next few weeks (next release of SDRuno)

How do discones compare to loops? For reception only, they seem to cover larger bandwidth and they also are cheaper

@@02vLxcZF Active mag loops are superb for HF and (depending on the design) below - see kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l9GpbNaHuJbWhIk.html Discones can work well above 10MHz (depending on the design) and are excellent wideband non-directional antennas for VHF and above. More about antennas here: www.sdrplay.com/antennasuggestions/

Baluns do add additional benefits with matching but the improvements are secondary to what you get by having a good ground when using wire antennas.

You are right... although it is of secondary benefit. :-)

@@SDRplayRSP True, it only becomes important when you have a transmitter, and start to worry about SWR.

Laeeq Khan Not a good idea as too close to mains likely to introduce hum

Yes - metal pipes and radiators can be good if they are not close to noisy mains wiring AND continue as metal for a substantial distance (to act as a counterpoise). Even better, if you are close to the ground then a direct pipe connecting all the way to the real ground could be effective. For safety reasons you shouldn't connect directly to the mains wiring ground ( again, if this is a direct and short route to a purposeful ground stake it technically would work but would be prone to electrical noise generated along the way !) The ground (earth) pins on you mains wiring are there as a safety feature and a fault condition could cause the ground to become live! (e.g. no RDS and a grounded metal appliance has an internal short to live. A more expensive soultion is to consider an active magnetic loop - these are so much better at reducing electrical interference pickup. Check out other videos links on antennas here: www.sdrplay.com/apps-catalogue/

I use a counterpoise for both receiving and transmitting in my 3rd floor apartment.

Hi James, ideally you would connect some kind of counterpoise to the outer of the coax at the point where the other wire starts. It depends a lot on the frequencies of interest. For HF and above, because you are a significant portion of a wavelength away from ground, you can't really provide an RF ground in a loft situation. Hence why it's a counterpoise. The purpose of this is to create as big as possible a differential instantaneous voltage at the point where the coax starts. The job of the coax is to bring that signal to the radio without adding more noise. (The radio earth doesn't really do anything to help) In the real world you also have to make the counterpoise run well away from the other (centre-fed) wire for it to contribute and this in turn may cause a headache in the same roof-space and since it may need to run near say house wiring which is a terrible source of noise! Regarding impedance matching, this tends to be of secondary benefit for receiving set-ups. Use of baluns is a whole topic in itself but first and foremost it will be about signal strength and signal to noise. (Again I'm thinking about HF and below - please note that for VHF and above the length and quality of the coax becomes very important). Best of all, I recommend asking these questions and sharing your set-up with others in a forum where they can give real practical comments, suggestions and advice: www.sdrplay.com/communitylinks/ (these are SDR and SDRplay-related but much of the knowledge is radio receiver agnostic)

Often, a portable shortwave radio's headphone socket is also coupled to the Radio's RF internal circuitry and is also RF Signal Ground. I found this article which tells you how to exploit this: groups.google.com/g/rec.radio.shortwave/c/sIpVAaOAHx4

Thank you for the help. I’ll have a look at the link.