I recently purchased an Icom IC-R3, a handheld 'DC to Light' receiver. It
didn't take long to discover that the telescoping whip that came with the
unit is worthless at HF and AM broadcast frequencies. (I suppose the 50 ohms
input looks like a short circuit to an antenna only a couple feet long at
500 KHz.) I'm thinking of stringing up about 60 ft of wire from the house
sloping up to my tower and feeding it directly into the center conductor of
some RG58 or Mini8 coax. Would this provide a usable signal for the IC-R3
from say the AM band through 440 MHz? I'm not looking for DX performance,
just casual AM broadcast, SWL, and local 2M/440 listening.

--
Bob D.
ND9B

Hello Bob,

Your suggestion will very likely increase the reception at MW and lower
HF. It will probably not increase reception at VHF and UHF.

I am not familiar with your receiver, but when you connect a long wire
directly to the input, the receiver may be overloaded (check with the
attenuator). Also transient phenomena (for example lighting) may damage
the input circuitry.

I use an OAR 8200 "DC to light" receiver, but in Europe (Netherlands)
it is unusable with a wire (strong overload), I made a tunable filter.
The disadvantage of the filter is that when I change band, I have to
retune the filter. For VHF I use a flat plate dipole optimized for 110
to 170 MHz (made of wire mesh). For wide band coverage from VHF to UHF,
you could use a discone antenna. Also here you may experience overload
problems when you are close the a transmitter.

A complete other option is to use a wide band active antenna, Maybe you
can find a design that runs from long wave to VHF based on a FET. Here
you also may experience overload problems

I hope this will help you

Wim
PA3DJS