FM aerial performance.

Apr 20, 2022 Last reply: 4 years ago 5 Replies

The FM aerial (that I probably bought at a boot sale) in my loft and always worked fine with my old Aiwa AX7400. That was disposed of on 2006 (should have kept it) in favour of an Onkyo mini system with DAB.



I have always had problems with 'hissy' reception on 92.9MHz from Rowridge (BBC R4) and recently bought a Denon DRA-455 tuner amp and that really struggles to get stereo FM on any frequency from Rowridge.



The aerial is a 3 element yagi but the dipole has two separate arms doubled back in the usual fashion but the ends terminate with plastic stoppers with a one inch gap separating them. There are no obvious electronic components where the coax connects.



After looking at FM dipoles online I notice that they have all? have a dipole that is continuous, so out of interest I cleaned the ends of the my FM dipole with wire wool and joined them together with a few turns of scrap 1mm lighting cable core.



Result !. FM reception in stereo as good as it gets and even R3 now has barely any hiss at normal listening volume.



I wonder how the original manufacturer intended it to work?



Maybe it was intended for 300ohm input (which the Denon does not have) ?. Mystery.


That was probably a mistake, remove them.

It sounds like an Antiference 'TruMatch' yagi. The two elements are not supposed to be electrically joined

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I pushed send too quickly, maybe don't remove them if it works better !

By sheer luck you must have used about the right amount of wire.

The conventional way to connect a nominally 300 ohm folded dipole to 75 ohm coax cable is with a balun although in strong signal areas you can get away without. The "feeding" a dipole diagram part way down.

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It was nominally for 300 ohm ribbon feed. You need a balun transformer to turn earthed coax with hot core into a symmetric balanced feed.

In article <t3pefi$1h4j$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>, Andrew <Andrew97d- snipped-for-privacy@mybtinternet.com scribeth thus

That sounds all rather odd, any chance of posting a picture somewhere?...

Must get around to modelling that in NEC to see if it widens the bandwidth at all which i expect it doesn't!.

Making a couple of FUBA UK-8 FM stereo aerials now look the bloody great big arrows with that dual reflector, had one years ago till a storm took the mast it was on down, bloody excellent performing aerial!.

One here on a rotator!..

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