Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio!

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Been there, done that, now it's gone

Posted by bartc (A) on December 3, 2006 at 15:28:29

In Reply to: Signal change when I move the coax wire why ? posted by legarem on December 2, 2006 at 04:40:26:

I was bedeviled by something like this for years, then I solved it for my system at least.

Started with 50' of regular coax from an attic mounted TV antenna through a 300-75 Ohm balun and down through a coax amp. Similar intermittent reception symptoms to yours whenever I approached the cable or whenever it was moved even slighty. In fact, it kept cropping up intermittently without any action on my part; I started to suspect that the cat was moving the cable.

Played with the connections at all points except the attic. No change that lasted. Played with cable placement all over the place, but still same problem kept coming back.

Swapped out the captive PC on the coax amp for a shielded DIY PC and got an improvement, but still had that intermittent problem you describe.

Taking out the coax amp or swapping it for other models (up and down in terms of amplification) only impacted the reception overall, but not the intermittent symptom you describe.

Started swapping out every piece of RG58(?) coax for RG6 quad shield and got much reception improvement, but still had the damned intermittent symptom you describe. Was making me really nuts.

On a last ditch effort after reading about antennas a lot, I detached the coax from the attic antenna run, shortened it to 25', and tied it into an ordinary Radio Shack FM specific Yagi outside the house. Did up a minor inductor tweak and a couple of current balun tweaks per Brian Beezley's site. Tested it out at 6' and 1.5' off the ground (it still sits on chairs in latter position) and was amazed at the result!

Floored is more like it. For the first time I had consistently high grade FM reception on all available channels, strong and weak, in stereo that rivals some CDs. No kidding! Really great.

But the best part was that I have never since gotten one single incident of that transient loss of signal you describe so well that I thought was linked to the cabling somehow. Nada.

So do yourself a favor and check out what kind of antenna or antenna comnections you're using (if you have an FM specific antenna) first. Then move down the chain and see what happens. If my experience is anything typical, I learned the old lesson that the antenna determines everything FIRST.... YMMV

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