Loop for Medium Wave

I have been a member for the British DX Club for a number of years now, and after reading the medium wave sections by Tony Rogers and receiving some friendly emails from him about the MW aspect of the hobby I decided to give it a bash. Having been mightily impressed by the performance of my homemade HF loops that I use for listening and transmitting QRP signals on amateur radio, I decided to build a loop for medium wave.
This one is only 10 inches across, but performs just as well as the proto-type I built which was double that size. In fact, recently I have been experimenting with reducing loop sizes, and my HF receiving loop has been reduced in diameter from over one meter to a mere 40cm with no noticeable drop in signal.

The Medium Wave broadcast loop sits on a small cake decorating turner that I bought for 50p from a church sale and does the job perfectly. It is tuned using an old vintage radio capacitor and covers about 580 to 1600khz.

I use this loop with my Realsitic DX394 as that radio, despite it's low price, is a really terrific performer on MW (both Maritime and Broadcast bands). It may not have selectable bandwidths like the Tecsun PL310, and there is no sync detector as on my Sony SW7600GR. But what it lacks in features it more than makes up for in sensitivity, and weak MW utility signals in the maritime band are way more readable than on my other sets.

I love rotating the loop and hearing signals peak. And it still seems like magic to me when I discover a weak signal present in the nulls of stronger ones. 

I have just ordered an MVAM109 varactor diode from the USA for £5 incl postage as I have read that with a 9 volt battery I can vary the capacitance of the diode from 30pF to 450pF using a variable resistor. The idea is to run 30 meters of wire from the shack to the summer house where my outside loops are located and use the varactor diode to tune either my HF or MW loop from INSIDE the shack. At the moment, if I am using my outside loops, I have to run down to the summer house every time I want to change frequency, which is a bit inconvenient!