Ray Ring at Circuit Salad posts the design and build of a simple, low current mini-whip antenna.

I decided to try using a small wide band E field type antenna with my newest receiver  design… the Mini SDR, and the results have been gratifying. There many useful articles describing this type of antenna; so I won’t go into much detail about how it works. More or less it functions as  a capacitive E field probe and therefore is very sensitive to EMI. However, if placed outside away from house wiring and provided with a modest local ground reference..the antenna is a good performer.

The circuit uses a JFET source follower and a BJT follower stage to provide impedance transformation of the Hi Z capacitive terminal to a 50 ohm Z drive for a transmission line. This circuit works fine but has some drawback, namely requiring 65mA of current and having a somewhat large input capacitance, which reduces performance with frequency. Ray says:

I decided to use a wide bandwidth op amp to simplify the circuit, reduce current, and provide a little  voltage gain. The op amp I chose was one I have used before for RF amplification..the LT1818.

See more in the post and the video below.