Aerials: Practical Considerations   

The wire aerials that come with tuners or hi-fi system will not give optimum reception, and to get the best out of a radio it is better to get an aerial fitted to the outside of the house, either doing it yourself or getting a firm to install it for you. If you don't want to, or cannot, get an aerial fitted to the outside of your house, then the next best thing would be to install an aerial in your loft, because as far as aerial positioning goes, the following rule of thumb applies: "the higher the better". 

If you cannot put up an external aerial, or would prefer to avoid the expense of getting it put up, then a cheaper alternative would be to get a dipole or Yagi aerial as described above. Such aerials are quite cheap (around £10 and upwards) and would give a better reception than the piece of wire that came with the set.  A good place to get aerials from is Maplin Electronics. As well as the aerial itself, you will need a length of coaxial cable and an F-connector (the coaxial cable and F-connector should be supplied with the aerial if you buy a kit at somewhere like Maplin Electronics), and instructions of how to connect the coax to the aerial and F-connector should be given with the aerial or would easily be found by searching on the net. 

Whether or not to buy a multi-element directional aerial or not depends on which type of radio system you want to listen to and where the nearest transmitters are and you can’t give general advice because all situations will be different. 

If you are trying to receive FM radio then you might be better to get a multi-element (directional) aerial and point it at the nearest transmitter that is transmitting the BBC stations. If you are in a poor reception area then multi-element aerials will help reception a lot. 

For DAB the situation is different. Some of the signals used in DAB are transmitted over what is called a single frequency network (SFN). This is different to how FM works because when you travel around the country the BBC radio stations use different frequencies to transmit at. Services that use the SFN (such as the BBC on DAB) transmit at just one carrier frequency across the whole country because they can achieve a better coverage level that way. The consequence of this is that you can receive the same signal from different transmitters at the same time. This has the advantage that if you do receive from more than one transmitter (all conurbations will do so) the received power will be higher than if you just received from just one. Therefore, unless you are in a poor coverage area then if you are planning to get a DAB radio then it will be better to get a single dipole so that you can receive from all directions. To see if you are in a good or bad reception area see the coverage maps of the UK but take into consideration that these maps are subject to change as the network of transmitters is still in the process of being rolled out. Currently, the BBC’s national digital radio transmitters cover 65% of the UK population (March 2002). That figure will rise to 70% by September 2002, around 80% by the end of 2003, and hit 85% in early 2004. The Digital 1 group of stations transmitted on DAB have a higher coverage than the BBC.

DAB Reception Problems

DAB is advertised as being interference-free and is supposed to be easier to receive than FM. Unfortunately the reality is that DAB's reception is far from perfect. Interference in the form of multipath can reduce the signal strength at the main carrier frequency and this result in too many bits of the digital signal being in error and a sound that is commonly called "bubbling" or "boiling mud" - because of the similarity between these sounds and what you hear on your DAB radio. This is quite a common problem with reception of DAB signals. If the multipath interference gets any worse than when you hear the bubbling sounds then the signal will dropout altogether and the audio mutes. This too is not uncommon, and you won't see this mentioned in the DAB advertisements.

It is a common misconception that DAB can easily be received using a wire aerial that comes supplied with the DAB radio. In some cases this is true, but in many/most cases this is not the case and you may well have to purchase a "proper" (i.e. metal rod-type) aerial.

Makes of aerial include:

• Triax

• Antiference

• Jaybeam

• Blake Aerials

• Maxview

DAB aerials at Maplins are as follows:

Single-element DAB dipole

3-element DAB aerial

FM Aerials

Most people think that they can receive FM okay just by using the wire aerial that was supplied with the hi-fi system or hi-fi tuner that they bought. Unfortunately, these wire aerials are far from ideal for reception of FM and probably the best value for money purchase for your hi-fi system is to simply to buy a proper FM aerial. FM aerials can be purchased from Maplin Electronics (stores are nationwide, or you can purchase online).

Certainly if you presently suffer from hiss on your FM signal and you use a wire aerial for your FM tuner/hi-fi then purchasing an FM dipole aerial is highly likely to drastically improve your FM reception and will in the vast majority of cases eliminate the hiss on the signals of the stations that you should be able to receive in your area. You can buy an FM aerial kit which is very easy to assemble from Maplins:

FM single element dipole kit (£14.99)

FM 6-element aerial (£24.99)

It is always best to have an aerial as high up as possible and preferably on the roof or in the loft, but if you just purchased the single-element FM dipole and put it in the room in which your FM tuner is located then you are very likely to drastically improve your FM reception.

I have the single-element FM dipole that there is a link to above and it is located in my flat and cannot go on the roof or in a loft and it drastically improved my FM reception compared to the wire aerial I used previously. It will allow you to receive more stations and for the stations that you already receive the reception is far superior than what is achievable with a wire aerial.

My advice would be to buy an FM dipole aerial and listen to the results before buying a DAB radio because DAB does not provide as good an audio quality as is available on FM on the vast majority of stations. In terms of audio quality (i.e. ignoring reception issues) DAB always sounds worse than FM. This might surprise you because most people think that a digital radio should sound better than an analogue radio but the truth is that FM still sounds better so long as you can get a good FM signal, and this is why a good FM aerial is important.

Last edited 24/2/04