🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris Sidi wrote:

> the radio in realaudio.  The tuner came with a cheap T-shaped ~6 feet wide
> wire antenna (dipole?).  

Well this is the first problem. FM is circularly polarized, but a dipole
is linearly polarized - so you lose half your sensitivity right there (a
loss of 3dB in received power)

 
> If I join the arms of antenna together (and maybe wrap it into a 5 inch
> bow), I can pick up 97.5FM, but there is always some noticable static in

Wrapping it up adds a circularly polarized component :) 

> mono no matter how I drape or pin up the antenna.

> chief engineer once recommended people around here ball up FM antennas, so
> I wonder if a bigger antenna just asks for more interference.

Here's are polarization factor again... Okay, here's what you can do.
The first thing you could do is go out and spend $15 on an FM antenna
with an LNB, in other words- an antenna with a pre-amplifier. OR, you
could build a directional antenna (I can give you a xerox of the design
procedure) with some decent gain. Other than that, it's almost
impossible to have an antenna with the correct input impedance for the
radio card. A folded wire dipole like the one that came with the card
won't work very well at all since the impedance changes drastically with
antenna position.