"W. Watson" wrote in message
et...
I had an occasion to talk with C. Crane today, and got onto the topic of
an
FM Antenna for small digital radios. I have the two mentioned in the
Subject
line. The agent menioned using just a sinple 5' wire for this purpose.

I've not had good luck getting FM reception with RS, and have tried a
simple
dipole without much luck. I live in the Sierra Foothills at 2700', and the
trouble is with stations in the Sacramento area (60 mi) and Chico (75 mi).
It occurred to me the simple 5' single wire antenna provided with Pogo has
been very effective in improving FM reception, so I put it on RS.
Practially
no difference with or without it. What's up with that?

Note that RS looks like shark fin, and has a built in FM and AM antenna,
and
a jack to plug in an external FM antenna. The RS is plugged into a USB
port
and it is very much like Tivo but for radio.

FM signals have a wavelength around 3 meters, so a quarter wave whip antenna
would be in the range of 75 cm long. Not fitting that into the fin, are we?
A built-in is a bad-deal compromise for FM.

How was your "simple dipole" connected to the RS? With two wires, perhaps
one to the FM antenna terminal and the other to common on the radio? You
don't say whether the jack was a coaxial jack or just a single-conductor pin
jack.

Not every antenna needs to be connected with two wires to work, but it's
true for the ones that work the best on FM broadcast. They're either coax
or twinlead -- two conductors either way. If EXT FM ANT is just a pin jack,
I'd get to the common electrically by soldering a wire to the negative
battery terminal and running it out of the case to connect to one of the
antenna leads. A cap in that lead will isolate any DC path off the antenna
jack.

A folded dipole is common antenna for FM -- easy to build, easy to hang on
the wall or tape on a stick for elevating outside a window. First ones I
ever saw were on my high school A/V Dept televisions. Cut for Channel 13,
the local educational station, and taped to a stick. Worked.