You need to look at your particular situation. It sounds like you are out
in the desert. Is this the case? Are there other strong FM stations
nearby? Any others close in frequency?

Sensitivity is relatively easy to come by. The "best" audiophile receivers
are more about selectivity, which sounds like it might not be an issue in
your case. There is a similar issue with antennas. Directionality is there
more to combat multipath then it is to get gain. Is the terrain flat? If
you are between a lot of buildings then nothing you do at the receiver will
make up for what you don't do at the antenna.

You are right about needing to get your antenna high, but for a single,
point to point circuit, there is such a thing as high enough. More won't
help. But less will hurt dramatically.

The other big problem is getting the signal from the antenna to the radio.
At FM frequencies, line losses are significant, as is noise pickup. If the
signal is marginal, then you need to get an amplifier at the antenna. If
what reaches the receiver is mostly noise then no amount of sensitivity at
the receiver is going to help.

At any given frequency there is only a certain amount of sensitivity that
you can use. At FM broadcast frequencies, that amount of sensitivity is
easily obtainable these days. You can probably do "better" in terms of
sensitivity by building something, but you wouldn't hear the station any
better ... in fact, probably worse by having too much of a good thing.

...

"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?