Hi Litt
Keep experimenting with your antenna:
Here are three rules to help you:
1.) if you can get it out your most favourable window get it up high and
away from the building
2.) experiment with positioning it away from household noise sources
3.) any sort of wire is good, even very thin near invisible wire - there are
purists who might dispute this statement, but I give you 40 years worth of
experimenting and antenna farming.

Portables generally don't like too much wire connected to them or they start
overloading and giving spurious images, plus you can also BLOW the front end
and end up with costly repairs. I wouldn't connect more than 10m/30ft of
wire to a portable.

If you want to build a "real" antenna you better get a serious tabletop like
an Icom R75.
Portables are designed to work well on their whip antenna's and have to be
small inexpensive and light weight, so trying to get them to emulate a
larger more expensive tabletop radio is only going to give you the problems
mentioned above.

--
John Plimmer, Montagu, Western Cape Province, South Africa
South 33 d 47 m 32 s, East 20 d 07 m 32 s
RX Icom IC-756 PRO III with MW mods
Drake SW8 & ERGO software
Sony 7600D, GE SRIII, Redsun RP2100
BW XCR 30, Braun T1000, Sangean 818 & 803A.
GE circa 50's radiogram
Antenna's RF Systems DX 1 Pro, Datong AD-270
Kiwa MW Loop
http://www.dxing.info/about/dxers/plimmer.dx

"littbarski" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hi there,

I really don't know much about shortwave / DX, but I have bought the
Siemens RK 661 (Sangean 808) some weeks ago. Now I have time to use it
an get used to it.
So it works best with an external antenna. I have a compact antenna
from Grundig (came with a YB400), but this don't work very good. Now i
tested a lot and found out that it works pretty good with a normal
stereo jack extension cable (4 meters), that I put on some good
positions in my room.
Is this a known "antenna trick"? I mean, I don't know anything about
shortwave antennas, so I would like to know if - with this kind of
nearly NO effort - there is another way to improve this solution I
found a little? or ist this already all I can do, if I don't want (and
can't) build a "real" antenna.

thank you!
littbarski

Hi John,

thank you also a lot for your answer. at the moment I am receiving many
good stations (as it's night here in Europe). I also took another wire
(also from my stereo) which is even better (with cinch a the end, not
so long, only two meters).

i will try the things you told me. grounding a portable is probably not
really necessary?

greets
littbarski