Radio won't stop playing Christmas music

Hmmm. Are you sure the station that plays quietly all the time is an FM station? AM can be decoded using only a diode (or anything that acts like a diode - think crystal radio). FM is more difficult to decode and usually doesn't cause problems like yours. Regarding the small coil, they bend the one loop to get just the right amount of inductance during the factory setup. You may have detuned a circuit by "fixing" the bent loop.

On 12/24/2010 10:22 PM Jimmy spake thus:

Just to clear up that one mystery, that wax-coated coil thingy is a "loopstick antenna", basically just a bunch of wire wound around a ferrite core. It's only used for AM, not FM.

Maybe it's a conspiracy.

On 12/24/2010 10:22 PM Jimmy spake thus:

Oops, sent that last message before reading carefully. That coil is on the circuit board, right? Basically, don't mess with any of them; bending them could change their inductance (basically their "coil-ness") and have adverse effects on how the radio functions.

Same with all those things in metal cans with adjustment screws at the top: those are adjustable coils or transformers, and turning the screws is guaranteed to screw up your radio.

Do you live close to a store that plays Muzak to its customers?

Hmmm. Are you sure the station that plays quietly all the time is an FM station? AM can be decoded using only a diode (or anything that acts like a diode - think crystal radio). FM is more difficult to decode and usually doesn't cause problems like yours.

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I had an old tube Roberts stereo reel to reel back in '85. It had no trouble at all detecting our local station on 97.1 MHz quite nicely. 100,000 W EIRP glaring down on my from Council Crest, about 3 miles as the crow flies.

This is a "supposed to be funny" troll.

A radio cannot play when it's switched off. You can't pick up enough energy from a broadcast signal to drive a speaker (except perhaps when receiving a

Tell your neighbor to turn their radio down, as you can clearly hear it in your flat.

If "off" is really "off", and not "on, but waiting for the remote control".

You hear stories about people who live near a large city's antenna farm, where the fluorescent lamps glow even with no wiring. If one of the local FM stations is badly maintained enough that it has residual AM on its signal due to a mis-tuned transmitter, you could get this effect. I remember some Usenet threads, many years back, on the battles a listener had with a station in the upper Midwest who had this problem. It was a religious station and God did their engineering for them so their signal quality couldn't be questioned. ;-).

Another example: my TV set was busy making buzzing noises on September

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

The 1950 ish console my parents had when I was young did pick up the local AM station with the radio off. There was no long antenna.

It's all in your head. Call a psychiatrist tomorrow.

I'm curious as to what the mechanism was...

In this case, the station is FM. Hearing the signal would require slope detection, an implausible/unlikely occurrence.

I remain highly suspicious, yea, even unto total disbelief.

Yes, and so did the brass rail bed when the near by AM station cranked up it's power during a baseball game.. You could literally lay there in bead and listen to the game coming from the brass rods which made up the head board of the bed!

This was a common assurance back in the days with beds made of coil springs and so on.. Get a few galvanic connections and you have your diode effects for the detectors!

It wasn't something that was load but my hearing was sensitive then and it still isn't too bad now..

Jamie

Since you're interested in learning and these days radio alarm clocks are so cheap they're hardly worth bothering to repair, why not use the faulty one as a donor for components to experiment with?

You'll nead some basic tools like a soldering iron, snipe-nosed pliers etc and a cheap digital multimeter.

Beginners electronics books sometimes come up on News:alt.binaries.e-book.technical .

Put it in the trash. Once it is in a landfill 20 miles away, you won't hear it.

If the person happens to be living over a business, would be safe to assume that maybe the business has a ceilling speaker mounted ?

jamie

On Fri, 24 Dec 2010 22:22:45 -0800 (PST), Jimmy put finger to keyboard and composed:

It should fix itself by Boxing Day.

- Franc Zabkar

We're assuming the OP has confirmed that the sound /is/ actually coming from the radio.

I had a dead car radio pick up a FM station, even though the output transistor had an open emitter. I was near the base of the tower at a transmitter site when someone preaching came out of the speaker. I was less than 1000 feet from the tower that had five, 50 KW transmitters feeding the curtain antenna. I had to laugh, since I was there to do the weekly maintenance on a 5 MW UHF Christian TV station. I bought a new radio a few days later and did an autopsy on the dead Delco AM only factory radio. It was a retired 1979 Chevy Malibu police cruiser, and I wanted to see if there were any modifications.

The RF was quite hot at that site, but it only picked up the radio station for about 100 feet before it started to fade. It was basicly an untuned crystal radio, in an intense field. It did have good audio, though. :)

With 250kW, it's surprising you didn't hear the station through your fillings.