What you are saying makes sense conceptually. But finding the decoder
circuit seems a little rough. How would one recognize this?

Secondly, I never considered the signal loss that the receiver itself
would have. I think that I could simply boost the signal at the exciter
(it already has some form of adjustable gain IIRC). Any reason that
would not work? Obviously, I would need to look at the overall
modulation... which I do not have the capability of doing... but that is
a separate issue.

Fred Francis wrote:
If you have any technical knowledge or know someone who does this can
be done with any decent receiver. You have to find the discrimator
coil or the input to the stereo decoder IC. This is generally the same
electrical point. You can either tap that point with a high input
impedance wideband amplifier or simply disconnect the input to the
decoder IC and feed this to an adjustable amplifier such as a video
distribution amplifier. Video DA's seem to work great for this purpose
as they have wide bandwidth DC to 6Mhz. I have done this a few times
and a scope is very helpful in determining loss through the ampifier.
Use a dead carrier with pilot 19Khz and measure a reference before any
work is done. Then when a connection is made to the input of an
amplifier check the level again. If the level to the input has dropped
you may have impedance issues that will cause you problems. Let me
know how this works for you or if you have any further questions.