A supid question from someone who thought he knew a bit about
electronics...

I’ve bought a mini hi-fi to place permanently in the kitchen but the
FM reception is bad and I want to treat it to an aerial in the loft.
The issues a

- The FM radio only has a short single wire for an aerial, no coax
socket.
- The transmission cable will have to run up a duct that’s full of
mains wiring
- It also runs close to the computer upstairs, which emits
interference

My intention was to run coax cable up the duct, hitched to a
four-element (or thereabouts) aerial in the loft. But now I’m totally
confused by ribbons, coax, baluns, impedence (not stated by the
manufacturer) and all the other trappings of this science.

Questions:

Trawling the net, some pundits suggest twin flat ribbon as a simple
solution. But surely the stuff is unscreened and will be highly
susceptible to stray radiation, reflections etc if I run it up the
duct? Am I right in thinking that, with coax cable, the ‘outer’ acts
as a shield to the signal running through the ‘inner’?

Every configuration, whether it’s ribbon or coax, ends up with two
conductors. Where does the second one go in the absence of a proper
socket? To earth / chassis / nowhere? (There's also a socket for an AM
coiled aerial, if that helps).

Signal strength in our area is fairly weak but does improve with
height. All I want is to boost the signal on main national (UK)
stations to an acceptable level for stereo.

At the moment I have a length of Twin & Earth lighting cable running
up the duct - we used it as a dummy just to get something fed through
(nightmare job!). Don’t suppose this will be any use? I was half
hoping that this cable, running about 15ft vertically, might in itself
provide enough extra signal, but attaching it to the radio’s aerial
improves things only a little.. We could always use it to pull through
a proprietory cable.

Help please. I don’t know where to start - especially with the single
wire issue. I was hoping to rig up something functional without a lot
of coils and calculations!

Thanks
Paul