I have a Sherwood RX-4103 receiver for my bedroom, and it has an annoying feature where it won't play the radio signal through unless it is a very strong, stereo signal. It has a place to connect it's antenna, which is just a wire that has plastic bits with screw holes to attach to a wall I'm guessing, but that's not something I'm about to do in my bedroom. I want to mount a better antenna outside my bedroom window, which is about 15 feet from the receiver. What kind of wire should I use to go from the new antenna to the antenna connecter on the receiver? It says FM (weird symbol) 75 and has two push connections to attach a standard wire.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks!
A standard TV antenna (aka the "rabbit ears"), with the proper plug adapter, should work just fine. However, on the receiver in my living room, a simpe 4 to 5 foot piece of speaker wire with one end connected to each terminal is all I need. They make dedicated FM antennas, but a lot of those are of the amplified (read: expensive) type.
Well... you can use speaker wire. I did that in my basement with that old Sanyo amp of mine. Worked fine. Just keep the ends separated and you should be OK (on the end that isn't plugged into anything).
I believe that funny little symbol (Option-Z) - Ω - means Ohms. At least that's what it means on a few speakers I've got laying around. I think.
So... yeah. Just run some speaker wire under your baseboard and out the window. Try it and see if it works - you won't harm anything.
A standard quarter wave FM antenna is almost exactly 5 feet long.
Take your speaker wire, cut it 5 feet long, and then cut one of the wires in the middle and strip the insulation from the other. Attach a wire going to the signal input on your radio to the two wires you cut and solder all three together. Attach another wire to the bare line you didn't cut and attach that to the ground terminal on your radio. Insulate the wires from each other so they don't touch.
You now have a dipole antenna. Hang it in a vertical orientation.