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One of the toughest places to get radio reception is inside an office building.
Construction materials like bricks and metal, and noise from computers
and other electronics can all combine to make radio reception almost
impossible for you. Besides the construction of the building, you sometimes
have to account for your location in a building as well. I used to
work at a corner desk in a windowless room on the 14th floor of a Manhattan
office building. We were allowed to listen to music while we worked,
but we quickly found that a radio was useless. Turning to the Internet
might have been a viable alternative at home, but at work, streaming
radio over the Internet would cut into the company's Internet service,
and it's not always that reliable anyway. Most of us settled for the
repetitive listening of CDs. Since you're visiting C. Crane, though,
if you work in an office and have terrible radio reception, you don't
have to settle. Here are some possible fixes for you:
Conventional Solution:
The simplest way to improve radio reception is to put a radio in a window.
If you can't do that, however, you still have several options. First,
just using a CCRadio plus,
with its sensitive AM capabilities, is often enough to improve your radio
reception. If you've already tried that, you might want to go the next
route, of running a wire from your radio to an antenna in a window. You
could run cable along the floor through the ceiling, or you could even
wrap it around a few co-workers if you like. No, really, running a coax
cable (like TV cable) from your radio to a well-situated antenna might
just do the trick. Two antennas to consider for this type of set up are
the AM Twin Coil Ferrite
AM Antenna and the FM
Reflect antenna. If you have an "in" with the super,
you might even be able to mount an antenna just outside your window.
Wireless Solution:
But what if you can't imagine setting up a bunch of wires in your
office, or it's just too much trouble to get a cable to run cleanly along
the floor or along the ceiling. What then? Well, then you can go wireless.
At home, I have a CCRadio with a Twin Coil Ferrite AM Antenna set right
next to a window - and attached to the headphone jack of the CCRadio
is an FM
Transmitter. I use the FM Transmitter to send a clean, clear
AM signal - that's right an AM signal - to other radios throughout my
home - even the cavernous bathroom. At night, I also use the combination
of the CCRadio and the Twin Coil Ferrite AM Antenna to fine tune a far
away station (DXing), and then send that signal to other radios that don't get very
good reception.
If you opt for the FM Transmitter solution, you can expect about a 70-foot
range in an office building, and that range will probably drop by about
ten feet for every wall the signal has to pass through.
Whatever combination you decide to go with, there are many reasons to include
the CCRadio plus in your set up. Say you like to listen to two different
stations at different times of the day - instead of getting up and
tuning the channel, you can program the CCRadio plus to switch
automatically to a different station at a set time. You can even use
this timer to set the radio to switch from an AM or FM broadcast to
TV audio (channels 2-13).
To view our past articles, please visit our What's
in the News Archives.
As always, please e-mail me with any comments or
article suggestions you might have. If you have a customer service or technical question,
please send to ccraneco@aol.com or
call 1-800-522-8863.
If you are interested in using C. Crane’s articles on your own Web site,
please let me know. I’d be happy to take a look at your Web site and
see what we can do. Good-bye for now, Carlos. About
the author
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