AM radio listening

[TC Chris]

So now it's fall, although we are supposed to have temps in the 70s midweek. The days are short and the nights are longer. This is the time of the year when I turn on WSM on Saturday nights fora dose of Grand Ole Opry. I clipped the long wire antenna onto the GE E-86 and turned it on. Wow, the whole bottom of the dial is BUZZ. I turned off everything in the house sequentially and it had no effect. The neighbors have one of those long strings of outdoor LED lights, bare bulb like used-car lots had in the old days. I'm wondering if that's the culprit.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

LED lights and AM radio are a bad mix. I have two incandescent bulbs above my bench and two in lights on the bench. If I turn on the overhead LED's I get more noise. Can you move your antenna to minimize the noise? There is a new country music station at 1280AM in Los Angeles that Shango keeps talking about. I may fire up my Philco 40-180 some of these evenings to see if I can get it here. The HOA won't let me put up an outside antenna if anyone can see it. I may try running one along the edge of the roof on the house, back to the shop. That should give me an almost 100' long antenna. We have a cell phone tower about a block away, and I'm not sure how that would affect a longwire antenna.

[TC Chris]

My long wire runs E-W on my long narrow lot, also running E-W. The power line to the house runs from the alley, E-W, on the other side of the lot. The antenna is in the only place I can put it. I put it up before I planted two white pines in the back yard, and now they have grown around it, not an ideal situation. But I'm pretty sure white pines aren't RF-noisy...

Does your house have an attic? When I lived in Lansing, my lot was compact with the house in the middle. No pace to run an antenna. So I installed one under the rafters in the attic, the length of the gable and back again.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

Our house has cathedral ceilings, so no real attic. We don't have rain gutters, either. I used rain gutters in Missouri and they make a good antenna, particularly if you have a metal roof. If you use the entire metal roof for a huge antenna, you get a lot of noise.....