Michael Black wrote:

Stephan Grossklass ) writes:
Jim R Feliciano schrieb:

I listen to KUSF at 90.3 on the FM dial. It is a college station from the
University of San Francisco. It has a weak signal. Here is my problem and my
question. I can receive the signal to the station just fine on car radios.
However, I cannot get the signal on portable AM/FM radios. My Sony ICF-SW1
can't pick it up even when I have thirty feet of speaker wire attached to the
antenna. I went to Radio Shack and none of their portable radios could pick up
the signal. Why can cars receive the signal easily and portable can't?

Very simple - actually, literally that, because portables' FM sections
aren't particularly sophisticated these days. 20-30 years ago things
looked different, back then you could actually find very good FM
sections (with multiple cascaded filters and all that) that easily
allowed some FM DX, while today even dedicated FM tuners usually aren't
any real DX machines. Car radios, however, are required to have
excellent FM performance for the reasons stated already.

Stephan

I think people sometimes get fooled by the money they spend on
a shortwave radio, which in many cases nowadays does receive the FM
broadcast band. They can be expensive, and provide good performance
on shortwave, so they assume FM reception should be exception too.

But little if none of the same circuitry is used in both bands.
There's a shortwave radio in the little box, and there's an FM
radio in the little box, with a common case and audio amplifier.

Given that, I assume a lot of the FM broadcast sections are very
simple, the sort of thing you'd get in a cheap FM radio. Why spend
money on something that most people don't care about? If it's good
for local reception, then it's fine for virtually everyone.

Michael


There IS a decent FM radio out there-the Tivoli Audio Model One, with
circuitry designed by the late Henry Kloss. Caveat emptor-apparently the
AM reception is terrible, because all the work went into FM. It costs a
hundred bucks or so and is available at The Good Guys (American
electronics chain store).