Review (4/5): Well made, quality built antenna
First, let me say that I was under no illusions as to what this antenna could or couldn't do.
On with the brief review:
After viewing a ton of YouTube videos on various MLA's I figured that I would home brew one myself. A month after that, and after acquiring only a few of the items necessary I figured it would take months to get this done (that's how things are at this moment, so when Chameleon antenna ran a big sale on the P-loop (<$350) I jumped on the deal! Less than a week later it arrived and I threw it up on it's selfie-stick mount and plugged in my antenna analyzer. Tuning was easy and the bandwidth, while small, wasn't really as bad as I thought it would be during operation and tune-retune. Note: I didn't try to make a perfectly round loop, nor did I get scientific about where to put the aluminum loop. I just eye-balled it. My initial testing was on receive using my FT-817. I noticed a tremendous difference in signals received compared against other indoor antennas I've tried. Today I made a 1500 mi. contact with 0 sunspots while using this antenna indoors, and in the middle of the room, and I am happy about that!
Things I like:
1. It's easy to put up and/or take down
2. Very portable. Everything fits into the canvas bag it came with.
3. It's pretty much a no-brainer to use.
4. Because of the nature of the loop it's very selective. What I mean by that is - by turning the antenna one way or the other it's easy to zero in on who you want to talk to while cutting out stations on nearby frequencies, or atmospheric noise.
Things I don't like:
1. As it comes, it will only take up to 25watts (SSB).
2. You can't tune it or rotate it remotely. This means the antenna has to be close enough to re-tune when changing bands or frequencies
(I do remember seeing a remote tuner/rotator on their website before, but apparently it's no longer being made/sold.)
For field day or other portable communications I think this would be ideal, and I plan to use it outdoors before it gets too hot in Texas. If I could put up something outside I would have gone a different route, but things being the way they are, the best antenna for me to use is the P-Loop. For a good loop comparison do a search for OH8STN on YouTube. He does a good job of reviewing this stuff. I knocked off 1-star for lacking remote tuning ability.