The Chameleon F-LOOP has been a long time visitor around the channel, but rarely featured on the blog. It has been with me to Lapland, Eastern Finland, Tromso Norway, operating from the deck of a Ferry between Finland and Sweden, and recently has been my go to stealth antenna system with the RTRR add-on. The F-LOOP was never the most portable, but has always been the most adaptable commercial QRP+ magloop on the market.
Background
Unless you’ve personally had a chance to use the F-LOOP in it’s various configurations, you could be forgiven for not understanding all of the benefits of the system. Unlike its little brother the Chameleon P-LOOP (now in its second revision), the F-LOOP is a flexible system built upon the Lego block concept often seen in Chameleon products. (Don’t worry this is not a sales pitch, I’m just giving you the background). The F-LOOP was designed with the goal of being the most “adaptable” commercial portable loop from any of the common amateur radio antenna manufacturers. I mean it’s not designed to be a one-size-fits-all product. It’s designed with options and add-ons allowing each operator to adapt, modify or customize it, to meet their own unique operating conditions. In fact I think the only way to improve upon this design concept, is to completely build it yourself. That’s it, there are no gimmicks, tricks, or marketing brouhaha.
Here are a few of the standard features, options, and add-ons.
- Free Shipping Worldwide
- 80m Double loop kit (Included with basic kit)
- Self supporting bottom plate, and tripod hard points. These are also tapped for 1/4 tripod (2x center and rear), and one 3/8 (rear) attachment hardpoint for tripods and other mounting options. (Included)
- Main loop attachment points (SO239 & pipe hard points. This allows the user to choose between installing a coax main loop, the optional aluminum main loop, or allows the owner to build their own main loop from other materials, copper pipe for example. (Included)
- 6:1 speed reducer on tuning capacitor
- Coax cable (Included)
- 2-pcs Aluminium radiator with tuned coupling loop (Optional upgrade)
- Booster kit with tuned coupling loop (Option upgrade)
- Power Compensator (Optional upgrade)
- RTRR Remote Rotator Tuner (Optional upgrade)
Perhaps you’re starting to understand it now. The F-LOOP is built the way the operators thinks, not the way some designer in an office somewhere tells you, you should think!
So what’s new on F-LOOP Plus revision 2?
These are a list of things I’ve noticed during my first hours with the F-LOOP 2.0. There may be more, but you’ll have to wait for my video for more detailed information. Let’s get started with these.
- The Plus model now comes as a 36” diameter collapsible loop radiator made of two sections of 1” 6061-T6 aluminum. It also includes its own 7″ diameter tuned aluminum coupling loop.
- On both Plus and Basic models, a removable telescopic mast with 3/8 thread, replaces the hardline coupling loop support. On the Plus model it supports the coupling loop and provides coupling loop height adjustment for improved SWR across all bands. For the Basic model, it supports the main and coupling loop, but more importantly allows variable height adjustment for the Booster kit, or for operator experimentation with smaller or larger custom loops sizes. It also helped reduced break-down size of the system.
- The front dial in now a larger Delrin component. This makes tuning much easier and much more precise. Between the tuning dial and the coupling loop height adjustment, there’s no reason why you can’t get a perfect SWR on any of the bands covered by this Loop.
- Common Booster kit compatibility with P-LOOP.
There’s much more to show you, and to talk about, but if we keep going here, I won’t have anything to make a video about.
I’m going to close this article by inviting you to View the full HD pictures that I’ve shared at the bottom of this post. I’ll also leave you with one more thing to think about.
if a company with a competing product tells you everything that’s wrong with all of their competitors products, rather than telling you what’s right about their own, you should probably do more product research, since in all likelihood, they are lying to you!
de oh8stn
