lugano, maybe flowers for a grave and Vodka for everyone else. I understand your point but the "media police" appear not to care. The legal cost to fight is way more than up front purchase.
Sorry to keep this thread steered away from FM reception, but I'm still puzzled about this. WHO are THEY? Who does the fining? Under what jurisdiction? If I choose to, say, play a recording of my friend's indie band at my restaurant, what claim does Sony or BMG have on it?
As for FM reception...it's time for me to try to remember something from my undergraduate days in electrical engineering...
Like with hi-fi, garbage-in, garbage-out. There's only so much clean-up you can do after the fact and you can't recreate a signal where there is none, so getting the best possible signal in the first place is the way to go. Powered antennas are usually incredibly low-tech and they just amplify everything in the RF so if there is a lot of distortion, interference, and noise, it boosts all that, too. As a result, in most situations, powered antennas are more trouble than they're worth and don't do anything useful you couldn't otherwise do with a good high-gain unidirectional antenna and a halfway decent tuner.
Also, bear in mind, terrestrial radio performance is heavily influenced by atmospheric conditions, so some days the atmosphere will be just right for you to pull in a low-power DX station 200 miles away and other days even the high powered mega-station across town will be tough.
So, the quest for decent FM performance has to start with an antenna. The cadillac of external FM antennas these days is made by a company called Antenna Performance Specialities. They make antennas for around $100-$200. Bear in mind, unless all of the radio stations you wish to listen to are in the same direction from your location, you'll need an antenna rotor to be able to spin the antenna around to point in the direction of the station you're interested in. So, in addition to a $100-$200 antenna, you're need a rotor, a mast, and, if you're not doing it yourself, the installation costs of crawling up on the roof and installing the mess. On the bright side, this is the single most cost-effective thing you can do to improve FM performance. Everything after this is diminishing returns. It is quite possible once you get a decent outdoor antenna and rotor set up, your job will be done.
The next best thing you could try is improve the tuner itself. There are exceptions, but just about every tuner made after about 1985 stinks, so find something OLD. There is a thriving business on-line of people buying and selling vintage tuners. At the high end, everyone's looking for that PERFECT and rare Sansui or Kenwood and shelling out a couple grand for it, but there are TONS of excellent tuners out there for under $100 that beat the pants off anything you'd find in Best Buy or Circuit City today.
The single best resource on-line for tuners, new and old...but mostly old, is
http://www.fmtunerinfo.com/ . You can find a lot of good information on acheiving good FM radio reception and on the vintage tuners themselves.
If you're looking for quick-and-dirty cheap (but it didn't 't sound like it from your original post), try the good ol' GE Superadio III. It's an outstanding AM and FM radio and favorite of many hard-core FM fans. Its fame and performance is only outdone by the Superadio II and the Superadio before it. It's darned cheap too, at $50. I see these things frequently in offices I frequent because they're CHEAP and they WORK, which is more than can be said for a lot of junk perporting to be an FM radio.
Hope this helps! And remember the three most important things about getting decent FM performance: antenna, antenna, antenna!
Dan
