Under The Eaves Horizontal Receive Loop or Random Wire Antenna?

[ultravista]

I plan on installing an under the eaves horizontal loop antenna for receive only. The wire is spooled so I don't know the exact length but I estimate it to be 250 - 300 feet.

The wire 'mount' is a long screw to bring the wire off the wood. I wrapped the wire once around the screw to keep it taught until the next screw.

A few questions:
1) For a receive only loop, what is the best way to attach the coax feedline?
2) Which is better - using it as a long wire (free terminating end) or a loop (coax attached to each end)?
3) Would a dipole (terminated or not) perform better than the random length wire or not?
4) Does wrapping the wire around the screw 1 time affect performance?

Looking for feedback on making this antenna efficient.

[Josh]

I had the same setup for a few years, fed with coax. Didn't use a balun, just had some ferrets around the fed ends of the rg6 coax. Used it as an all bander, most of my hf rigs with autotuners would find a match on hf, my ts850 would tune it on 160m. A fine hf antenna for rx porpoises, but it did pick up rfi a bit, especially the neighbor's crt tv till it fried and he replaced it with an lcd tv.

That antenna got me Bear Island on 100w ssb on 15m, it's up only like 20 feet at the highest. Loops are grand.