Building a good receiver of any kind is complex, if you really want
good specs. Very few people have been able to accomplish this at home.
Just for calibration, you will require the proper instruments and
skills.

A good FM receiver with the proper antenna will do it, as long as the
antenna can see over the horizon, and within your distance range there
are no other stations at the same frequency. There are also the
physical limitations to consider as well.

Since the range of an FM station is about 120 to 140 miles at the very
best with a good antenna, there may be allowance for other stations to
broadcast within a 150 mile radius. If there are other stations, these
may be difficult to tune out.

You would be best off with an antenna that is cut to the frequency you
want to recieve, it will have to be able to see over the horizon
enough to see the transmitter site, have the proper directivity, and
be very well impedance matched to the receiver.

All the high end FM tuners are designed to be able to use an external
antenna, using a 75 ohm coax type hookup.

Have you considered calling this station to see if they are on the
net, satellite service, or on your local cable TV service? Many of
these small stations are on the net, and broadcast streamed
programming. This way you can use your computer to listen to them. '


Jerry Greenberg

--

(Alan Horowitz) wrote in message ...
a city I visit frequently -or more precisely, it's exurban outskirts -
has only one mellow-Jazz FM-broadcast station, the only one for many
hundreds of miles.

thus I have decided to build my own single-station hi-performance
receiver to get the one station.

I know enough to know that ideally, the bulk of the gain,
directionality, selectivity should be at the antenna itself. Or even
more to the point, tower height. At least ideally. And
hi-performance single FM channel yagi's are easily spec'd from a
number of antenna houses. So that issue is not being placed on this
table.

The rest of the gain budget is.

Let the discussions begin. For example, what approach do the known
"name" receivers (Kloss Model One, GE Super Radio) use? can a
homebrewer do better?
Which commercial house builds the best resonant chambers for the 108
Mhz frequency? Can be be done easily at home? how about the
demodulation and audio portions?