Thanks for your post, and welcome to Ultralight DX
fun.
The designers of the slider E100's (John Bryant
and I) have experimented with coupling external antennas to the slider
loopstick ferrite bar by using an inductive coupling system, where a
BNC connector runs to a small coil of wire on the ferrite bar, on the side
opposite the coil. This not only allows the effective use of high gain
external antennas like EWE's, K9AY's and beverages, but the slider coil can
still be used as a preselector, filtering out unwanted image and spurious
signals.in urban and suburban areas. In such cases, the high gain of
the external antenna "swamps" the slider loopstick RF pickup, so that
there is no incompatibility or "competition" between the two antenna
systems. John's fine article posted on dxer.ca., "Slider e100 as a
Varicoupler" gives full details.
To my knowledge, nobody has yet tried this slider
E100 inductive coupling system with a smaller antenna, like the Quantum
QX-Pro Loop. This is one area of experimentation that is still
uncertain. The 7.5" loopstick slider E100 by itself is capable of great
sensitivity, as any owner knows. During summer experimentation,
experimental 17", 22.5" and 27" ferrite bars generally didn't provide the
hoped-for great sensitivity benefits over the 7.5" models. After building your
slider E100 and testing it out with the Quantum QX-Pro Loop, you may also
discover that the 7.5" model provides a lot of "bang for the buck." But we
certainly would be interested to know your results, either way. Good luck
on your slider project.
