I’m an avid listener of a community radio station, WMNF 88.5 FM (“Not a member of the Big Brother Broadcasting Network!”) in Tampa. But I have a hard time picking it up on radios inside my house. My bedside clock-radio won’t pick it up at all. My RCA portable radio picks it up, but with static and interference from other stations – it’s worse some days than others. My car radio, on the other hand, picks it up just fine. By comparison, the local college-NPR station, WUSF 89.7 FM, comes in with static on my clock-radio and just fine on my portable radio and my car radio. I talked to a tech at WUSF and he said, while both stations transmit from the area of Riverview (southeast of my house, on the other side of Old Hillsborough Bay), and both have a transmitter of about 70,000 watts, the difference is in the height of their transmission antennae – WMNF’s is only 600 feet high while WUSF’s is 900 feet high.
Given that situation, which I can’t change, what can I do to improve my indoor reception of WMNF? I checked at Radio Shack and they don’t sell any booster antenna for a portable radio.
Also – if anybody knows – why is it that reception of a radio or broadcast TV station sometimes improves if you touch the antenna with your hand? Why should the non-metallic human body act as a booster antenna?
I’ve had several clock radios with a wire antenna that came out the back. These gave good reception, especially if the wire was taped to the wall so it was vertical. I believe the best length for an FM antenna is related to the frequency you are trying to hear.
Here is one page with directions on making your own, but I don’t know how you would attach it to a radio without an antenna connection.
Most clock-radios I have seen opened (not many admittedly) used a metal loop around the power cord as an induction loop–to allow using the power cord as an antenna of sorts. These used to be commonly external (where you could see the metal loop around the power cord right where the cord came out the plastic case) but now I generally don’t see them, so they are internal, but you can still achieve the same thing anyway: just get a few feet of single-conductor wire of any convenient size, tape about a foot of it along the clock-radio’s power cord, and then hang the remaining length up like an antenna. A dipole type (like what that webpage shows) isn’t necessary, since there’s no easy way to feed it into the circuit anyway.
~
Semi-related: I have also read at least once that this same principle is what walkman-style radios use for their antennas as well–except that they utilize the headphone cord instead. So for those, you could basically do the same thing, except run another wire along the headphone cable for a short stretch.
~
Assuming your portable radio has a single telescoping rabbit ear for an antenna, get yourself a wire 8 feet, 4 inches long. Strip about an inch of the insulation at one end, and attach it the the rabbit ear as close to the radio as you can, just by twisting it tightly around the metal. Point the ear in one direction, and stretch the wire out in the opposite direction. This may give you enough of a boost to get rid of the static.
This will pick up best in the direction perpendicular to the wire and rabbit ear, and worst in the direction along the wire/ear. You can play around with the direction to minimize the interfering station and maximize WMNF.
I have never tried it but I have heard that metal Slinky’s make great signal boosters if you can drape them over an existing antenna or connect to one in some way.
Carl noticed the reception cleared up on one station when I walked by the radio. We ended up with a metal crutch propped up against the wall, in the right place as found by trial and error, near the radio, to act as a ‘focuser’ for the signal.
