The First 100 Years Are The Hardest

For the past six months I've been using a fairly old Yaesu FT-100D rig in my jeep to make QSOs and  chase POTA from the local park up the street that has a lower noise floor than my home QTH. Even though the FT-100D is a solid performer on HF and VHF/UHF, I wanted to upgrade the rig to enable better receive sensitivity, better controls and  menu options.   One thing I never liked on the FT-100 are the small, sticky buttons-one of the main drawbacks for me on this older rig. Well, I got my wish, inadvertently, after trying to install a Yaesu XF-117CN CW 300Hz mechanical filter I bought off eBay for $135.  These old radios require careful handling, and I had to remove 3 ribbon connectors, five coax cables, and lift out the receive PCB board to solder the mechanical filter in place.    Long story short, after a week troubleshooting, I got the radio up and running again on 2M, but the radio is no longer usable on HF:  low speaker volume and no RF sensitivity making it essentially deaf

 Today I installed my receive only loop antenna properly on the roof, including an RCA rotor.  Nearly properly because at 18ft the loop doesn't quite have a clear line of site to the RF horizon as recommended by Larry, W6LVP who designed the antenna.    The loop covers 160M to 10M with no tuning or adjustment. At my request Larry installed a 5-pole 1,700 kHz high-pass filter in the preamp to attenuate strong signals in my area.  He also wired the loops power inserter with an F-type connector on one side (loop), and BNC connector on the other (radio).    I'm using 100ft of quad-shield RG-6 ($35 from Home Depot) from the shack to the loop.  Quad-shield RG6 is designed to protect signals from interference and has good common-mode rejection to protect your loop antenna signals.  For the rotator, I'm using an RCA VH226E from Amazon, controlled with 100ft of 18ga 3 thermostat wire from Home Depot ($0.36/ft).  The setup works great, and receive is at least 1-2 S levels quieter on