Active Loops, Active Voltage Probe and Wire Antennas; A Statistical Review of the Performance of Six Antennas (Part I)

For the last 18 months the author has been involved with Pixel Technologies in developing and producing the high-gain low-noise preamp used with the company’s series of shielded magnetic loop antennas. Recently Pixel asked me to perform a series of comparative tests on the latest version of their loop antenna (Model RF PRO-1B) to determine how it performs relative to other loop antennas and other types of antennas in general. In these tests the Pixel RF PRO-1B and the Wellbrook ALA1530L loops were evaluated with four other antennas in a series of automated performance measurements, totaling more than 500,000 individual signal and noise reference measurements, comparing six antennas: