I posted this in the Antenna forum but got no replies, so I thought I'd try posting it over here in Homebrew and see if anyone can help me.

I have one of those white under-cabinet Sony kitchen radio / cd players. The radio uses a digital tuner. They have notoriously poor radio reception, and the internet is full of posts by people ranting about how Sony could sell such a poor radio.

I thought I'd ask you experts if there's anything that can be done to improve the reception. I understand the power cord is used as the antenna. I've tried stringing-up an extension cord to the power cord, with no improved reception. Could I open it up and attach an external antenna? If so, how would I do this? Any ideas, or experience with this particular problem?

Regards,

jeplett wrote:
I posted this in the Antenna forum but got no replies, so I thought I'd
try posting it over here in Homebrew and see if anyone can help me.

I have one of those white under-cabinet Sony kitchen radio / cd
players. The radio uses a digital tuner. They have notoriously poor
radio reception, and the internet is full of posts by people ranting
about how Sony could sell such a poor radio.

I thought I'd ask you experts if there's anything that can be done to
improve the reception. I understand the power cord is used as the
antenna. I've tried stringing-up an extension cord to the power cord,
with no improved reception. Could I open it up and attach an external
antenna? If so, how would I do this? Any ideas, or experience with this
particular problem?

Regards,


In theory you should be able to do so -- you'd have to be able to
identify the RF section of the thing and find the capacitors (or
whatever) that are being used to couple to the power cord.

In practice it may not be the antenna that's the limiting factor -- a
crappy receiver is a crappy receiver, no matter what you do with the
antenna. You might be able to go as far as putting in an external
antenna with a preamp, but you may still not improve the receiver
performance, and at that point you may have done enough work to have
installed a _good_ receiver into a similar sized cabinet.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

I thought I'd ask you experts if there's anything that can be done to
improve the reception. I understand the power cord is used as the
antenna. I've tried stringing-up an extension cord to the power cord,
with no improved reception. Could I open it up and attach an external
antenna? If so, how would I do this? Any ideas, or experience with this
particular problem?

In radios of this sort that I've seen, the tuner input circuit is
usually coupled to the AC powerline in one of two ways. Sometimes,
there's a small-value (picofarads or nanofarads) high-voltage
capacitor between the tuner input and one side of the power line. In
other cases, a wire from the tuner input is wrapped around one of the
power-line wires several times (I suspect it's serving as a gimmick
capacitor of a few pF).

If you can identify the way in which this coupling occurs, you can
probably disconnect the tuner input from the line, and bring it out to
a separate jack (pin or banana) of some sort. Then, try hooking a few
feet of wire to this jack, and see if you can get a stronger signal.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
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