🚀 go-pugleaf

>I work in a computer lab in an interior room on the 4th out of 4 floors.
>My radio picks up FM fine but AM does not come in at all unless I move to a
>outer room.

>Moving the antenna makes little difference and is 72 inches long.
>I tried running a wire from the ground plug of an outlet to the antenna but
>it did not help. Why didn't this work? I figured the ground wiring would ac
>as a giant antenna..................... Does it have to do with the geometr
>of the antenna with the flux normal to the surface generated as I assume is
>the case with UHF and VHF television antennas?

> My question is how do I get reception? Can I buy a signal amplifier for
> a radio?

My office is on the fourth of nine floors.  I have the same problem.

First of all, connecting ANYTHING to the whip antenna on your radio
isn't going to help.  The whip antenna is for FM reception.  The AM
antenna is a coil of wire wrapped around a ferrite core inside the
radio.

I purchased a small shortwave receiver from Radio Shack.  I have found
that it picks up AM stations much better than the cheap clock radio I
was using before.  I imagine this is because of a more sensitive
receiver.  I get a lot of noise from my computer, though.  I have found
that be rotating the entire radio and moving it around the room I can
find spots and angles where the noise is minimized, but not completely
eliminated.  Since you are in a computer lab, there is probably much
more noise than my single computer generates.

There are external active antennas that will improve reception of weak
signals, but they also amplify the noise.  I would think that in a
computer lab the interfering signals would be the limiting factor rather
than the weak signal strength of the desired stations.

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 . SLMR 2.1 . Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
                                                                                             
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