Test: End fed wire versus AlexLoop on 40m

Recently I acquired two WSPRLite beacons. I want to use them to test various antennas to find out which ones are most effective /P. I have built a number of different antennas and I still have a few projects planned. Modelling antennas gives you an impression what to expect but you only find out in the field what the real performance is. Actually, you need (more or less) parallel reports to account for changing conditions and WSPR is a nice system to get these reports accurately. 

Two identical 200mW WSPR beacons

I started using the beacons at home testing the performance of my AlexLoop against my default antenna - an end fed wire. At home I use 20m of wire that is resonant on 10, 20 and 40m. That wire runs from the back of my house at approx 8m high to a corner of my garden and then still a couple of meters along the far end of the garden - sort of an L-shape. It ends at approx. 1.5m high. Nothing special - not your DX killer.

Although this is a convenient test for me to do at home, the comparison is not that exotic as both a low hanging and sloping end fed wire and a portable loop are realistic /P antenna options.

The first tests I used the AlexLoop in the attic on 20m, 30m and 40m. It turns out that although the loop is higher there, the attic itself attenuates the signal too much. It is just not picked up while I do get spots from the end fed wire. So I moved the loop to the garden at a height you would put it at when going /P - the center at about 2m high.

AlexLoop in the garden

I tuned the loop to 40m. Now spots were coming in for the AlexLoop. Running both beacons for 24h on 40m I can get a good picture of the difference between the AlexLoop and the (low) sloping end fed wire. 

Comparing the spots of the two antennas from the same RX stations, I find that the loop is mostly 10dB or more down from the end fed wire. That is an enormous difference. There is no advantage to be found on any distance for the loop.

Odx for the AlexLoop was EA8 with 3000km (2 spots from EA8) with 39 different spotters over the measurement period.
Odx for the end fed wire was N8 with 6500km (14 spots from W) with 110 different spotters over the measurement period.

The graph above shows the spots for the end fed wire (blue) and the AlexLoop (orange) on 40m over the same measurement period. The distance to the receiving station (in km) is on the vertical axis and the signal strength (in dB) reported by the receiving station on the horizontal axis. 

Apart from the two orange dots at 3000km (EA8) the AlexLoop does not reach much further than 1000km. You can also see that the end fed wire gets better signal reports - with significantly more dots to the right. 

So, my first test of the beacons worked out well and I have my first bit of data on two antennas. My idea is to create a separate section on this website dedicated to antenna performance based on future experiments with the beacons.