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Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio!

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Re: Help with FM Antenna recs...

FIrst thing to do is to find out how far away from the stations' transmitting sites, and what direction they are in.

Resources such as:


Can help determine those parameters. It will also give you relative signal strengths of the respective stations.

If you are within 20 miles or so of commercial, high power radio stations, and that's all you want to receive, then an indoor antenna like the Magnum Dynalab Silver Ribbon,

may be all that you need.

A little farther away and one of the omni-directional antennas like the MD ST-2,


or the Antennacraft FMSS,

would work without having to worry about transmitter direction.

FWIW, the Radio Shack omni which looked the same as the FMSS is no longer listed in their on-line catalog.

Now, if you are a bit farther away, or interested in low power stations, then a directional antenna will help pull in otherwise noisy stations.


Radio Shack has only one dedicated FM antenna listed in their catalog:

I use one of these to give a full quieting signal on a College station that is 5 miles away that was noisy on the typical folded dipole that usually accompanies tuners and it works very well. The local fine-arts/Classical station, KPAC, is around 135 degrees from KRTU but has enough signal strength that I get it full quieting, too. KONO, though, which is off the back of the beam, is noisy to receive, and some of my tuners won't even capture it.

This fact illustrates how a directional antenna works to give you gain...by concentrating the area that the antenna can receive signals from into a smaller arc, more energy from that direction alone is able to be delivered to the radio. This helps if you are in an urban situation with lots of RF reflective surfaces that can cause multipath...or have powerful stations close together in frequency that can cause distortion in the tuners front end, you can aim the beam at the one you want and decrease the amount of energy coming from the unwanted station.


Stark also lists other gain antennas,

that may help out in fringe situations.

Now, if you are close to a powerful station and you install an antenna with gain, you can overload the front end of your tuner and cause all kinds of strange probles...so, if you don't need a big honkin' Yagi, then don't go to the trouble.

Full quieting is full quieting and no amount of additional gain is going to do much for you, and as I said before, may hurt more than help.

I know that we are always trying to get the best possible sound from our sound systems, but in a properly executed antenna installation there will be no difference in sound between Brand X antenna's 8db of gain and Brand Y's 8db of gain, for instance...the things that do make a difference are the quality of the connections to the antenna (don't want any galvanic or mechanical noise) and the lead in (picking up unwanted noise from anywhere else but the antenna).

Another implementation to consider is to install an outdoor TV antenna for receiving local stations, using that for TV, installing a splitter, and running a feed line to the tuner...

With the signal strength that is available in your area, you can probably use one of the omni antennas unless you were interested in the Skagit Valley College stations or KMCQ, they're the only ones that show less than strong signal reception in Kirkland. Looking at the Google map of the area, I really would consider one of the omni antennas if you don't think that an inside antenna would work for your stations. Sometimes all that is needed is a $10 set of "Rabbit Ears"!

Hope this helps

Rick

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