Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire AM/FM Radio Antenna

We live in a remote area and our house and both shops have metal roofs. We can only get one radio station (FM) inside the house or shops. We can get a few more from our car radios when they are parked outside (but reception is less than stellar). We are starting to explore either an inside or outside AM/FM radio antenna to provide us more options. It is not a big enough of a deal to go the Sirius Radio route. I also assume that some radios may have better reception capabilities. I would be interested in hearing experiences on improving AM/FM reception with antennas and/or radios.

Sorry,.., not much help.

A cheap rooftop TV antenna would work fine, especially if all or most of the stations are located in one direction from your shop. (They are fairly directional.)

Or an antenna from a junked car, for that matter. Mount on the roof and add a bit more coax cable to reach inside.

The less radio, the better.

Studying to hopefully get my ham license, so I had to look this one up. I believe this is the guts of that ham rig.

there are lots of options, and the technology has improved greatly over the past years with the new HD/digital converter antennas. I picked up one off of ebay for our northern farm/lake house that has a metal roof. It has its own rotater, was only about $40, and works great in that remote area of no. WI. We added a Wilson antenna for the cell phone, and that's all we needed. Amazon, Radio Shack has lots of options to cure your problem as well.

Sweet Mother of all things Holy....

And they want to give me a ticket for Texting while driving....

If you have internet service already you could get http://www.iheart.com/?cmp=iheartradiocom for free.

logger,

No antenna well gain you much under that metal roof.
Mount a decent antenna with a rotor on a tripod-type mount on top of the roof, and you should be able to pick up a bunch better than you can now.

Myron

Think about it.... if they tried to make radio illegal while driving... the resulting trucker strike would shut the whole Country down.

heck, they gots bluetooth CB's nowadays......

Ken,

I have a radio on, in the garage 24/7... receiver with a pair of speakers...attached to a CD deck..

I've been doing this since the early 70s in college, and learned it from a couple of cousins who lived in Southern WVa, where radio and TV reception sucked...to say the least...

But I have one of the old Rabbit Ears antennas hooked to the stereo out there...locally here it picks up all the radio stations I regularly listen to, as well as the radios in my vehicles...

I had a few relatives back there that attached their stereo radios to the old outdoor on the roof style TV Antennas, and mounted high, those really brought in the radio stations, especially at night bringing in the old Super Powerful AM stations back in the Midwest and East Coast... like KBW in Buffalo, or WOWO in Ft Wayne Indiana, WLS out of Chicago, and WRKO out of Boston, WCCO out of Minneapolis, plus stations out of Miami, New Orleans, and even out of Canada...

I was up at 4,000 ft one night elk hunting, and camping in my truck.. woke up at 3 AM, and couldn't get back to sleep, so turned on the radio... on AM, I was picking up stations from up in Alaska down into Mexico...

So with AM all you need to do is get some height...

The outdoor TV antenna really brings in the radio stations, I would go that route.

A simple loop antenna should work. I ran 120' loop and was pulling in Japan, Korea, Oz, etc.

Shortwave and AM being pretty much a thing of the past the only stuff being broadcast over the airwaves is mostly garbage.