whats the fuss about FM?

[Dave Plowman (News]

I've got an AM2. Pretty rare and fetch a fortune on Ebay. ;-)

[Dave Plowman (News]

Pretty certain he meant car radio. Called a turnlock? You pressed the tuning button to step through pre-selected stations.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Brian Gaff (Sofa) pretended :

TV is the same, on the less watched channels, though not necessarily due to the transmission. Most of the problems are there, before the program leaves the recording studio.

Smithsonian seems to be particularly bad for audio, often the narration volume will just tail off, then come back.

Other channels have the background music so loud, you cannot hear or make sense of the speech.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Really? Even with most stations compressed to hell and back?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Tim Streater submitted this idea :

I used to listen in to the local ones, until they went digital, but after that I could still tune in to the county lot around North Yorkshire.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

The Natural Philosopher formulated the question :

I have a Sony ICF 2001D at the side of the bed, on a home made stand, to prevent it falling over. I bought it for £10 in a car boot sale, in a superficial sorry looking state, but it cleaned up well.

[Dave Plowman (News]

For some reason, 'top' has gone out of fashion. So much TV these days seem to use personal mics with no EQ to get round their awful position relative to the mouth. Or perhaps now use cheap equipment with no decent EQ units in each channel of the mixer. Or operators who don't care.

Just compare speech quality on say R4 via FreeView to that on most TV stations.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Mark Carver formulated on Tuesday :

IC in my car, only has one FM tuner for it's audio and an autoseek system. When a signal becomes too weak, I goes off to try to source a better frequency for the same transmission. The result when it goes seeking is a constant waffle noise as it seeks, ending with me turning it off.

It does have a second tuner built-in, but that separately seeks out local traffic reports, to feed to the GPS navigation system, for on the fly route improvements.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Clive Arthur formulated on Tuesday :

Sheilded plug and ignition leads helped with those problems.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Dave Plowman (News) pretended :

I quite liked the Motorola with the pre-tuned push-buttons and triangular knobs. They had a nice tone to them on a decent speaker.

[JNugent]

There were two ships bearing the name "Radio Caroline"; one near the Isle of Man and one down south somewhere.

The northern one broadcast on 199m.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Max Demian explained :

I think so too - when was the Sinclair FM kit sold?

[williamwright]

You are confusing Caroline S and Caroline N.

Bill

[Fredxx]

That is my belief. I'm sure the bandwidth of the FM signal is such that

1mV is less than the noise floor of a 75 ohm antenna.

I'll let someone else look it up or do the maths.

[Fredxx]

--correction-- 1uV

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

williamwright expressed precisely :

Oh, thanks - I didn't know that..

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

It happens that Dave Plowman (News) formulated :

I would guess that as the reason, the background music remained at steady volume, just the speech being lost.

[Mark Carver]

Lots will turn up and down the volume according to engine noise, but that's not dynamic range compression.

Unless it's DAB (or other digitally sourced content, mp3, CD, etc), DRC is just asking for trouble on weak or noisy signals

[tony sayer]

And then off Frinton anyone remember Frinton Flashing;?...

[williamwright]

My radio was run over by a steamroller when I worked in a highways gang in 1967. I was paid out by Clugstons and bought myself a Bush portable that had VHF on it. That was the first VHF FM portable I had. At home we had a 405 line telly a Furgy that had FM on it. It worked fine.

Bill