Originally Posted by canklecat

I pretty much gave up on outdoor wire antennas. My last one was really good, a partial wavelength 40m vertical loop that was hidden inside a wooden fence. Cheap too -- just magnet wire, an impedance transformer and TV coaxial cable feedline. Very quiet considering the usual RFI. But my apartment complex maintenance crew always find them and tear 'em down. It doesn't violate any lease agreement and technically a ham operator must be permitted to be able to use some sort of outdoor antenna. But the language and cultural barriers defied all my efforts and reaching a compromise with the apartment management and maintenance staff. So I'll toss up a temporary antenna some weekends and holidays, or just go outdoors with a portable.

BTW, you don't even need to be home or awake for shortwave or pirate broadcasts. There are freely accessible SDRs online, many with options to record to your computer hard drive. The SDRs are scattered worldwide so it's fun to see how a broadcast is propagating.

Sometimes I'll run an audio patch cord from my receiver to my PC's audio in port and set a recorder to run for hours. Later I'll go back and see if I caught any broadcasts. With a graph it's easy to spot the transmissions as long as the local RFI isn't too bad.