Radio not tuning in correctly

I was told there were some smart people in here that might know how to help me. My problem:

I live right outside of Boston in the same town that the FM station 103.3 is transmitting from (appx. 3 miles away). The problem is that on one side of my apartment my radio is seized by the apparent signal strength of the 103.3 frequency and I can hardly tune into any other channel. What I really want is to listen to (primarily) is 104.1, and that transition tower is only 9 miles away…

Am I right that it is my proximity to the 103.3 tower that is causing my radio to exclusively tune into their station? Could they be transmitting too broad a signal? Is there anything I can do?!? Thanks.

Here is some info I got on the towers from http://www.bostonradio.org/radio/fmdial.html
103.3 Transmitter (3 miles)
ATC Newton
1165 Chestnut St.
Newton, MA 02464-1308

104.1 Transmitter (9.5 miles)
Prudential Tower
800 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02199

It’s almost certainly not the fault of the 103.3 transmitter, since the FCC strictly controls spuarious emissions from commercial broadcast stations. The problem is, in part, the quality of the tuning circuitry in your receiver. Not that it’s necessarily a bad radio, but it simply wasn’t designed with a very strong, nearby transmitter in mind. Even though you may be tuning your radio to 104.1, the rolloff of the tuning filters is not sharp enough to keep out ALL the 103.3 signal. Filters don’t simply pass one and only one specific frequency and reject all others; in reality, they are tuned to a center frequency and designed with a rolloff (expressed as so many dB per octave of signal attentuation) to give an approximation of the desired notch. If your radio uses an external antenna, you can install an attenuator, which will reduce the level of signal presented to you receiver’s front end.

I have tried and failed with two alarm clock radios, one boom box and a shower radio (which can barely even tune into static)…so it looks like I’ll have to live with it or get a better radio.

Thanks for the quick response (and a good answer too)!

If any of the radios has one of those telescoping rod antennas for the FM reception, you can try “handicapping” it by removing the antenna. Failing that, you could try putting the radio in a Faraday cage, using a mesh size calculated to give, say 10 dB attentuation at 103.3 MHz. Or any other number of ideas I could come up with, in order of increasing silliness. :smiley: