On Tue, 28 Jan 2014, David Combs wrote:

I'm having a hard time finding a decent fm radio.

Ones I've bought at costco -- when a cab drives
by the house, you hear him transmitting on
his radio.

And LOUSY sensitivity!

(Where do they make these things, in China?)

I look in Amazon for table-top radios, and
not one gets consistently decent reviews.

And apparently all of them are slapped together
with ZERO effort at defect-free construction.

So, you guys have any suggestions?


Most FM receivers are actually too sensitive, they are designed as if they
will be used in the country, and thus overload so badly that the weaker
stations don't get through.

I once brought home a mini stereo system that had been lying on the
sidewalk. And it didn't get the not quite local NPR station which is
pretty receivable here. I touch the antenna, the signal appears. I take
off the antenna, the signal appears. Removing the antenna reduced the
local signals so the receiver didn't overload, which meant the weaker
distant station could come in fine.

Not that I've ever spent much money on FM receivers, but the best I've
ever tried was a Delco digitally tuned car radio, I'm not sure the
vintage. I got one for a few dollars in 1997, ran it off a 12V power
supply, and it still there as a bed side radio. I actually separated the
AM and FM inputs, and have it connected to a dipole along the ceiling.
Nver overloads, has good selectivity, and it was on that radio that I
heard Mississippi one summer morning about a decade ago here in Montreal.
Yes, that was special propagation, but I heard the station because I was
using the radio for not quite local stations (over the border in Vermont,
at least one of them only came in at night).

That said, my Sansa Fuze has a decent FM receiver. It has no place for an
external antenna (I assume it uses the headphone wires for this, like so
many) but it will get that NPR station with no problem. I'm fairly
certain they are doing the radio in digital, new techniques, because it's
really too small a package for an old analog radio.

The problem is that most people don't listen to distant stations, so
there's no sense in investing money in it. SOmebody's likely to suggest a
shortwave portable, but you can't make that leap because the FM is using
separate circuitry from the shortwave section, and the FM is an extra,
something likely not spent much money on. There may be exceptions, but
just because that shortwave portable cost hundreds of dollars doest' mean
the FM section will be any better than that $20 boombox.

Though they seem to be fading, not that long ago one could find endless
well known brand am/fm tuners and receivers for stereo systems. A lot of
those probably are good, because there was a period when AM was declared
"useless" so it got a cheap tuner, but FM was still seen as important, so
if you were spending a couple of hundred dollars on a tuner, you likely
got something decent. And there was a time when such tuners or receivers
sometimes included new techniques, trying to improve reception, and some
of those things were valid. When I needed a new amplifier for my
"computer speakers" about a decade ago, I found a nice am/fm stereo
receiver, complete with jacks for two tape decks (which worked well with
the sound card) for seven dollars. Any such receiver with auxiliary
inputs then means you can plug in that MP3 player or whatever. The only
reason one may no longer find them is the period when people were getting
rid of them may have passed.



PS: In an earlier life, back in the 50's and 60's,
I was K5TEQ. Built (of course) DX-40, and even
that HUGE heathkit ham receiver. Later got an
NCX-something SSB transceiver (could NCX
have been the name? -- it was SO long ago.)

A three bander, the National NCX-3, a five bander, the National NCX-5,
or their top of the line transceiver from the late sixties, the NXX-1000.

Michael