Tuner's and aerial's

As REO Speed Wagon once said" you can tune a piano but you can tuna fish".

I was wondering what people use to grab there fav etheral broadcast material.

I've a loft aerial of the omni type, which provides reasonable signal levels, and is able to pull in Fm signals [DX] from considerable distances.
As I live in Nottingham I can get Birmingham local fm stations and to the north Sheffield.

I also have a digital cable box that has most of the well known radio stations carried on an Fm feed [?]. Though these do not sound as good as the straight aerial feed.

When the cable tv box was installed a few years back, I had two engineers come out to show me how good their Fm feed was [It was the first they had installed !]. It was a suprise for them that there was a differece in sound quality and that a BBC Radio3 live broadcast was better via the loft aerial than by cable box. Anyone else noticed anything similar ?

 

Ron Smith

Zanash

I have just had a Ron Smith Aerial fitted on my roof and the results are excellent.

I had a "normal" 4 prong aerial up there to feed into the NAT01 and it was fine, but the Ron Smith aerial which is about 7ft long and say 4ft wide and deep gives a superb signal.

Well recommended.

Ron is packing up the business in a few weeks, so if you want one, get in quick.

Regards

Mick

 

Thanks for the heads up.

Had considered this in the past but I'm in a bungie and have to put aerials below the ridge line [officially]. So It would have to live in the loft, where really there not enough space for a Ron Smith monster.

 

I've got a large omni in the loft Zanash - stuck on the end of about 8m coax, and fed into a 6/7dB fixed gain amplifier. It serves up supper for me anyway. Depends on the sensitivity/selectivity of your tuner of course as well. The Pioneer i use sucks in 100% from that omni on all the mainstream stations - so no problems there, and i have not felt the need to change. The main problem i suffer from is multipath effects, particularly on Radio3, and more so in the day - not sure if this is anything to do with living under the flight path though? It seems to be much better at night.

 

So who else will admit to using the tv cable box for radio ?

My fav old tuner is the Hitachi Ft5500mkII a classic of the tuner world, notinthe same league as the troughline but. The one really intresting feature of this tuner is the signal strength metre, not the normal little lights but a full blown numerical readout. It allow realy fine tuning [pun intended] of the aerial and down lead.

What are people using as downlead ?
I'm now on low loss sat. coax with a really thick foil screen, but always on the look out to improve things.

 

I use my sky digibox for radio. I dont listen that often though.

 

Two tuners

Chaps

I have my dining room system connected to sky. The radio service is quite good but admittably I use it to play the local BBC service.

The main system is connected to the Ron Smith aerial and live broadcasts from Radio 3 are superb.

I would say that the Sky reception is pretty good. The Naim NAT05 does not seem to suffer from it. My only complaint is that I cannot receive Classic FM on it

Regards

Mick

 

That true......have you compared them back to back on the same programe material ?

I found that BBC R4 is better for voice on the aerial but BBC R3 better on cable for recorded performances, though not live ?

 

In my case it would be meaningless

Zanash

That is a good suggestion but my two systems are totally different.

The dining room system is 1980's style..32.5+hicap / 250 amplification with a NAT05 tuner.

The main system is a 52/135 system with a NAT01 so it has a big built in sound advantage over the dining room one.

I find that the aerial gives the best sound on Radio 3 and 4. I might be guessing here, but I would imagine that the reason why Radio 3 live broadcasts sound so good, is that the best sound engineers make sure everything is spot on.

My main point is that Sky seems to give a very good signal to keep most of us happy.

Regards

Mick

 

Yup, I find that the FM broadcast quality for the stronger stations is better than what I can get through the Sky digibox. Radio 3 is broadcast at 192 kBps, the highest bitrate of UK broadcasts, which accounts for its quality. The others are at lower bitrates to varying degrees. Sky broadcasts at the same bitrates, but the mediocre digibox audio channels means it can't really compete with good FM reception, although it will be better than weak FM signals if only for the lack of noise.

 

I'm thinking along th same line as the comment......

 

I use the sky digibox to listen to total rock on 885. Have the tv hooked up to the marantz amp and it doesnt sound too bad. Did have a yamaha tuner, but used it so little and took up one more shelf/plug that I part exed it for something else!

Also means I can tape it on to vhs so can have extra long tapes if I need to.

 

Well, I have 3 radio options in my house:

1) FM from an 8 element externally mounted roof top aerial.

2) Digital radio from a digital set top box (Telewest) as part of my cable provider's digital TV package.

3) FM from an analog modulated feed coming from a cable TV feed (Telewest).

Option 3 was actually a legacy from the days when I took my cable provider's analog TV service, but to this day is still operational as the enginners never disabled it when we went over to digital cable TV. It is by far the worst out of the above 3 listed options. Not only does all the modulation/de-modulation that goes on in the cable transmission chain before it gets to you screw up the sound i.e. the cable provider (Telewest) appears to be adding even more compression and mush to the original FM at their point of reception. But also, the reception, "their" reception, is particularly bad with high levels of hiss and multipath. A £130 Sony tuner I have which has a digital signal strength meter, gets a very decent 54dB yet still hisses as if it was only getting a 40dB signal, which prooves that even the cable providers FM tuner being used as the originating source in the distribution chain isn't getting a very good signal to begin with.

Radio via digital cable isn't bad at all for most background music duties. For choice it can't be beat, but for serious listening to the national networks, it has to be my main FM rig, a ReVox B160 with Triax FM8 pulling in the signal. Radios 2 and 3 off air on FM are a bit weaker the than the other stations in my area, so are subject to a bit more hiss, whilst the signal strength metre does indeed show them up to be a bar or two weaker than the others which are very strong pick ups. The lack of multipath compared to the cable FM feed, and the loss of detail caused by data compression on the digi box's radio feed both mean that the big FM rig wins hands down for quality.

I use to live in Surrey (moved to Devon now), and wasn't far away from Heathorow (M25 J13 about 1/2 mile away), and can confirm from experience that being under a flight path does indeed signficantly affect the quality of your FM radio reception. Multipath is much more evident during the day, and especially when lots of aircraft are stacked up (the area I lived in certainly seemed to be "stack" circling area), but at night the reception was beyond reproach.

Like Mick, I use to have a Ron Smith Galaxie 17. Fantastic. I'd happily put a G17 fronted £200 s/h analog tuner up against any DAB set-up at any price.

 

I've heard that dab is not as good as a topnotch fm tuner.

Your probabley spot on the cable Fm, as we've switched to digital too. NTL my provider how ever ,seems to have left the signals relatively untouched. The digital radio.....I'd forgoten about does sound a bit strange. Through the TV its limited by the speakers, via digi box and analog IC's is acceptable through the pre amp's aux connection. But not as good as the fm feed of the cable. The one big plus is the convertion of BBC 5live to fm. Which is my choice background radio, now BBC R4 lost most of the current affairs programing.

 

background, current affairs programing

Zanash,

.

You might like to try the BBC World Service (MW only), I have this on throughout the day and a better provider of current affairs and news programming I have yet to find. I think you may even find that it is offered by a few cable providers.

Auric

 

RON SMITH is back....!!

Good news for all you tuner people, I have just seen a note from the Salisbury area that Ron Smith is back on the job.

Auric