FM Survival

[Ferretfancy]

Anna

I'm very lucky with excellent FM reception with my recently refurbished Quad FM4 tuner, but then, I'm high up in North London and that must help. One thing that is very noticeable is that the modulation level on R3 is lower than on R4,so any transmission shortcomings will be more apparent.Why the overall level as received is lower on 3 is a mystery, but listen to the news on both channels and the difference will immediately show up. I'm not referring here to the use of compression, but rather the average modulation level as transmitted. I rarely listen to Classic FM, they are in a different galaxy.

[Panjandrum]

I'm glad this topic has been raised since we had a strange experience at the weekend. We wanted a digital radio for the loo since the analogue is out of synch with the digital radio in the bedroom. I phoned the technical help desk and the guy reckoned that this was about right for ' 6 little batteries'! He suggested we could simply put a new set of batteries in every day! The net result is that our old analogue Roberts Radio (found for a fiver in a chartty shop!) is back in pride of place. (I always thought its battery consumption was excessive at a new set every 8 weeks or so!)

Does anyone else have experience of running digital radios from battery power?

Have you thought about turning the bedroom radio up?

[Don Petter]

Anna

I'm very lucky with excellent FM reception with my recently refurbished Quad FM4 tuner, but then, I'm high up in North London and that must help.

Ferret,

I wonder where you got the Quad refurbished? My FM3, while still working fine electronically after about thirty-five years, has just decided to have its tuning drive cord slip, so I can only tune between about 95 and 108 MHz, which is a bit of a disadvantage for R3! Maybe I'll risk a look inside to see if I can fix it myself.

[In the great British tradition of improvisation, I've been sometimes feeding the Quad system from R3 on my Pure Highway, using an intermediate frequency of about 107MHz, which I can tune into, but I'd much rather listen directly on FM for quality.]