perhaps you can increase the sensitivity of your radio.
perhaps you can increase the sensitivity of your radio.
I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with AM/FM car radio boosters that are available relatively inexpensively on e-bay, and claim to increase the sensitivity of your radio for both FM and AM. They sit between your antenna and your radio, and I guess act as preamplifiers.
If they do work, seems like a pretty inexpensive solution to increase the range of your AM Part 15 station.
So you would have to convince all potential listeners to buy & install one of these in order to listen to your station, or buy them yourself and give them away...
I've never actually used one of these, but you would also be amplifying the noise level, so I'm not sure how much you would benefit, plus on strong signals you probably would overload the radio's front end.
Of course Radio Monkey is right in what he says, but since these devices are inexpensive, I will voice a request for ArtisanRadio.
I encourage you to invest in one, test it out, also exploring whether they can be installed on some indoor radios, and give us your report here on Part 15.us
The initial idea of improving the range in this way is the kind of inventive idea we love to hear about.
Thank you.
Antenna amps would be great for my situation.
Not so much for attracting listeners but rather for my own
listening pleasure.
Where I live some of the stations I want to receive are just out of reach.
I used to live 45 minutes north of London,Ky and had little to no trouble hearing radio stations (mostly on FM) from Lexington,Ky.
Heck, when conditions were right I could watch television stations coming from Cincinnati and Dayton Ohio before the switch to DTV.
Now that I live in London,Ky, Lexington is 60 miles north of me , many fm stations i listened to have swapped frequencies with others stations or just do not have the power to reach down South.
One station I enjoyed was WKQQ 98.1 fm, a classic rock station.
From my driveway here i can barely hear Double Q but if i visit the Daniel Boone National Forest i can climb a hill there , point my minivan towards the North and receive Double Q just as if they were right here in London.
There are other stations I would love to hear but, noise or location keep me from enjoying static free reception.
Then again, as was mentioned before, you amplify the noise too.
Around here, there is plenty of that.
A link from an earlier post
A vendor on the interweb
And from the Youtube machine 🙂
radiomonkey has the right idea. A low-noise preamp for AM really isn't worth the effort because the limit to sensitivity is mostly the atmospheric noise, not the noise in the receiver front-end circuit.
A loop antenna such as the one mentioned can be useful for improving reception on AM if the noise and interference levels are low. They can make an impressive improvement in the sensitivity of a low cost AM radio. If you've never tried one, I recommend doing so. You can make one very inexpensively. One of my favorite techniques is to use a copier paper box and wind about 20-25 turns of insulated hook-up wire around the long side. Connect the ends to a 365 mmf variable capacitor salvaged from a discarded radio. You can adjust the number of turns to obtain the desired tuning range. Tuning is normally quite sharp.
As Ermi has pointed out, this will not help if there is noise or co-channel interference on the channel, but if you have a quiet frequency in the daytime, you might be surprised at the improvement unless you are already using a sensitive AM radio such as a GE Superadio.
Best way is to use some sort of streaming via license free wifi and over the air license free am or fm.
you would start out with a master site and gradually add mesh nodes that can be solar powered.
these would consist of a 5.8ghz backbone transceiver and a 2.4ghz ap transceiver along with a barix stream receiver and either a high quality am or fm certified tx.
so that each site can provide access via am or fm plus to any wifi enabled devices in the area.
this is no cheap endeavor, but in order to reach an audience it never is.
i have put a whole lot of thought into this over the years and this seems to be the best solution i can think of.
Interesting comments. I intend on purchasing one (total investment of about $10) to see if they work as claimed (and the vendor does claim that they increase the number of stations you can receive on AM as well as FM).
I was intending this to be for my use, but in some areas (such as my little island) locals may be interested (if it does work) in adding it to their car radios.