"Richard" wrote in message ...
http://www.home.earthlink.net/%7Esrw...rundig-100.htm

"FM? Whazzat?

After 25+ years in that business, we no longer listen to any FM
broadcasting. Why; when we have 9,000 classical CDs, an eight-foot grand
piano, a Yamaha Clavinova, and a harpsichord?! In order to be useful to
readers who might, however, want to know about the FM performance, we did
tune to the band and TRY to pick up a station. Surely the only one we would
ever want to hear, from our home in San Jose, would be classical KDFC,
102.1, in San Francisco. It was absolutely unreceivable. Ditto via the Radio
Shack DX-397; and there is almost no trace of it either using the Sony
7600GR.

But a late-60's Grundig Music-Boy germanium transistor radio (original
manual at left) picks it up quite clearly! This shows the sad deterioration
of FM radio design over the decades; the old discrete-component radio, with
excellent selectivity, could pull KDFC out of the hiss and mush; the new
ones, with their short whip aerials and IC cookbook designs, just did not
have the power and discrimination."


I'm wanting a pockety sized PLL radio that will, on FM performance, actually
equal, at least an, old Grundig radio for sensitivity, cross-modulation and
image rejection!

While it is certainly unfortunate that KDFC is the only classical
station left in the SF Bay Area, you overlook (perhaps deliberately?)
a few of the root causes of this problem: More stations jammed onto
the band as close together as permitted, most of them using higher
power than the good old days, and the fact that stereo requires a
better signal to get through.

You really cannot blame the receivers for this mess.