AM and FM Antenna Placement.. and making them.

Crazyray and all - are right - it is a guess as to whether you can get the station you want - trial and error are the best teacher - so cheap parts work when I am working on an idea rather than fact.

Dutchmaster is right - the frequency is important- from there you can cal your measurements -

Boosters - the noise gets boosted too, you need to filter that and that is a whole other subject requiring more consumption of root beer -

cheers - hope it works

ps nighttime is better - yuo get ionispshere bounce working in your favour - That why you hear some stations only at night - sunlight interfers with this so you don't get that extra distance.

wizofid

[surreal]

edit
weirdest double post I've ever had

[DutchMaster]

So its a FM musicstation?
Than the design in the article is a simple solution. It is horizontal polarised instead of your car antenna which is vertical polarised.
The horizontal placed antenna works like a directional antenna so you can point it to the station for the best reception:


        &n bsp;X (station)





---------------- (your antenna (horizontal placed))
        &n bsp; |
        &n bsp; |(lead to your radio(vertical placed))
        &n bsp; |
        &n bsp; Y

Making the lead multiple lengths of 30 inches (30,60,90..) improves things too, but keep it as short as possible.

Edit: the spaces are gone grrrr, working on it.

Fixed!!!

[I_W]

As you have been advised, it's possibly a trial and error issue you have here.

For many years I lived in Santa Barbara, CA, and our FM came from 100 miles away in Los Angeles. The best thing you could do was to put a 10 element FM ONLY antenna as high as possible and use good quality lead-in (open wire 300 ohm was best at that time) and orient the antenna as best you could for optimum reception.

Some stations would be solid for hours at a time, others would be sometimes very good and other times very noisy or not there at all. Depends on the weather and the conditons and time of day. The move to stereo on FM made things even worse as to fully quiet the FM signal requires a stronger signal when the broadcast is multiplex. You can help with that by using a tuner or receiver that will allow you to force mono reception.

Yes, horizontal antennas are best but many FM stations these days use transmitting antennas that include appreciable vertically polarization for the listeners in their car with vertical antennas.

It is likely, unless you have a very good tuner or receiver, that your car receiver is better and more sensistive than what you have at home. Thus perhaps the better reception from the car.

I thought that Radio Shack still had 4, 6 or 10 element FM only antennas but don't find any at radioshack.com. I'd suggest the cheapest way to try this all out is to find somebody with a decent fringe or near fringe TV antenna, perhaps still on a pole on their roof, long ago abandoned for cable or satellite TV. Some but NOT ALL TV antennas include appreciable gain on the FM band. Some brands had a design that purposely decreased gain in the FM band to provide less interference with Channel 6 so it's a crap shoot.

Put the "free if you take it down and haul it away" antenna on your own roof if at all possible as high as you figure you can safely. We always used to go at least 40 feet but 10 feet could work.

Use low loss coaxial cable with decent connectors on it. Make it as short a run as possible to keep the losses down. IF you discover after carefully rotating the antenna and locking it in the direction of greatest signal (could possibly not be in the exact direction of the desired station depending on reflections from tall buildings or mountains) that you get a signal that is near usable, then you might want to try an FM preamplifier either right at the antenna or in the feed line.


Having said all this have you checked to see if that station is available as part of the cable TV system? In the wilds of Nevada I would think that the cable provider would offer FM from LA and other nearby areas that could be received from their antenna farm. Perhaps for extra $$$. And have you checked to see if that station or an equivalent one broadcasting the same type music is available over the Internet?

[surreal]

Well I just took a piece of speaker wire and split it about 6 ft, the station is 107.5 so i fugured I had it covered.

Now it's just occurred to me why to use the 300 om instead of just a copper wire,, picks up the wave twice? but why not twist the bare ends together?? and make a loop of it? and why is the last inch exposed on the 300om wire in the instructions??

Geeze I love this place ... TechIMO.

[surreal]

Quote:

FM from LA

hee hee that's why I left LA . Noise polution

Actually my wire I put on the ceiling has worked but I'm barely loosing the high end of the sound.. (a little fuzzy) ..
But now I'm really motivated to try something a little more exact. If Im getting that kind of results from just speaker wire.
I hoped this would be the case cause it's straith up a graduale incline from Vegas to here.

But stop me before I go this far.... and put wires on the ceiling enableing me to slide the antenna, for siganl position with each station

(sorry my spell cker is dead)

[I_W]

If you are really wanting to "build" something here's a reference that has some pretty basic stuff and is oriented to the VHF and UHF spectrum. FM is at the low end of that frequency range.
http://www.packetradio.com/ant.htm#vhfcut

Don't try to use "logic" when working with antennas. There's a lot that seems to the layman to be "black magic." In reality there are issues of maximum signal transfer and impedance matching.

Yes, random wires, single strand wires and the like will sometimes work if you're lucky. The easiest antenna to make is probably a folded dipole out of 300 ohm twin lead.

http://members.home.net/ac3l/antenna.htm

Remember though that a low elevation dipole that you're making receives from two directions and to get decent gain and a strong signal you need a beam/yagi antenna that concentrates and narrows the pattern to one direction.

[surreal]

Quote:

folded dipole out of 300 ohm twin lead

yep, I figure that's about as far as I can push it

Remember you're talkin' to surreal here

[Richard Cranium]

Radio Shack "Ultra Deep Fringe" antenna with a "up the pole" booster, and don't forget the lightning arrestor.

Test the area by walking around with a handheld FM to find the strongest signal strength spot prior to placement.

The hillsides near you may deflect the signal which is ordinarlly "Line of Sight" in the case of FM

Whaever happened to the promised AM Stereo ?

[surreal]

Quote:

Making the lead multiple lengths of 30 inches (30,60,90..)

Dutchmaster,, why?

Quote:

Put the "free if you take it down and haul it away" antenna on your own roof if at all possible as high as you figure you can safely. We always used to go at least 40 feet but 10 feet could work.