On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 04:34:00 GMT, "Dave Pitzer"
wrote:
The signal fades to next to nothing and then increases to very
loud but extremely distorted then will be loud and clear for a while.
(During the day this station's signal is fine.)

Your problem is selective fading. You are probably using an ordinary
AM receiver. When the selective "notch" hits the carrier it gets very
weak and the automatic volume control turns up the RF-amplification.
But at the same time the sidebands are not nulled out to the same
degree. So you get a loud distorted audio signal resulting from
relatively strong sidebands and a very weak carrier.

If you couldn get a receiver with single sideband reception or - even
better - fase-locked "sync" reception you would get better sound. You
would still get some distortion but it would be of a much less
malignant (linear) kind. I would thnk that this is a more realistic
solution than trying to null out the different signal path with some
sort of sophisticated antenna. I use a Sony "sync" shortwave receiver
myself for listening to eg. BBC with good result.

Jeppe