help: DIY antenna for portable CD player (?)

It is not easy. You have to open the unit, find where the internal antenna connects, bring out a wire, run that wire outside, outside of the metal shell of the building and erect a wire outside as an antenna.

Basically, when confronted with this kind of situation, find another station that comes in better, buy a radio that might work better (you cannot tell until you try it) or give up.

and

read

earphone

Dan Fraser top-posted without trimming:

Or you could buy some CDs. :-)

Cheers! Rich

If reception outside the building is crap then you're stuck.

If it is okay outside the building then you can overcome the problem by using two additional antennas. Real antennas, not bits of wire. Mount one outside the building, pointing in the general direction of the transmitter site and one inside the room or area where you work, pointing generally towards you. Connect the two with the type of cable for which they were designed.

Thanks for the answers so far, which suggest the poor radio reception might be as much or more a problem with my surroundings (i.e. building construction attenuating signal strength) as it is with a crappy antenna on the CD player, which I had originally wrote the problem off as. At least I've got a few new tests to try to see if I can pinpoint exactly what is causing the crappy signal.

On the idea of wiring into the unit itself... any ideas on how the antenna works in one of these portable radio/CD players? Is the antenna really wired along (into?) the headphones as I had read somewhere?

couldn't you just wire a hifi tuner type fm aerial to the appropriate headphone lines, with maybe a passive high pass filter to keep the audio signal out of the aerial?

e.g. wire up a jack plug and socket something like this:

1.5 nF || Left o--o---------------o-------||---------o | | || | | .-. | | | | | | | |1 kOhm | | '-' | | | | Gnd o--|--o------------o------------------|----------------o | | | | | | .-. | | | | | | | | | |1 kOhm | Aerial | | '-' | | | | || | Right o---|--|--o---------o-------||---------o----------------o | | | || | | | 1.5 nF (3dB point = 100 KHz) | | | | | | | | | | | | o o o Left Gnd Right

I don't know if this would work though, or if it's the right way to do the filter - it's a question not a solution.

Where I live is on the outskirtrs of good FM reception. Using a longer headphone wire improves reception. As does positioning the wire"just so" ERS