Best Roof Mounted FM Antenna

i'm not familiar w/the ron smith aerials antennas, but i use an antenna performance specialties aps-13 to great effect. it is directional, so ya prolly wood need a rotor, unless yer on a fringe area, & all the stations are in one direction.

in my case, i'm ~60 miles nw of the stations i listen to, (wpfw & weta - know them sugarbrie?), & i'm near the bottom of a ~1500' ridge, on the nw side. so, the ridge is between me-n-the stations. w/the aps-13 on the roof - no fancy high-mounted tower or anyting - i get excellent reference-quality sound thru my onix bwd1 w/soap p/s tuner. for info, see:

http://www.antennaperformance.com/

hope this helps, doug s.

My mistake - the rotor is channel master and the antenna is antenna specialities.

I have one of those $20 Radio Shack roof FM antennas that I've had since 1980. They do work very well !! I do not currently use it because the TV antenna allows me to use a TV in that room as well. There are lots of stations around DC even without cable.

I am getting great reception in the Fairfield County, Ct area with a $20 directional FM antenna purchased from Radio Shack, + another $40 for installation hardware. It was the best $60 that I ever spent on audio gear. A friend of mine installed it for me, so I saved the $250 that the local Channel Master installer wanted for his antenna. Depending on where you live, you might want to spring for a rotor. If you self install, make sure that you ground the antenna. Good luck.

It depends on your situation. This is not voodoo; choice of antenna depends on well-known engineering. I use a directional Yagi with a rotor that is FM only for MY PARTICULAR APPLICATION. It is made by channel master and OEMed by several companies including Magnum. My specialist installer - who did not sell me the antenna - warned against amplifiers - they amplify signal, noise, multipath, and so on. There was good information on the Fanfare web site. You might start there or give them a call. A longer discussion goes beyond the scope of my reply. Just remember that quieting is often logarithmic - not linear - and a 3 db clean signal gain can give a VAST improvement in signal quality and musical enjoyment, all other things being equal. Can you give us more information about your locale, tuner, etc?

I used to have a top shelf FM reception kit (FT-101A Etude from Magnum Dynalab) and live near a mountain that made reception very problematic. I solved my problems with the ST-2 Omnidirectional antenna from Magnum Dynalab. It has a coil at the base that will give you 20dB of boost. If you want more you can add the FM-205 Signal Sleuth also from Magnum Dynalab, it's a FM signal amplifier that will boost selectively the frequency you need. Those two components gave me fantastic results.

I am not familiar with that antenna. I also use an attic mounted multi element TV antenna for FM. I have it pointed to the south to pick up a couple of distant stations which it does well enough, some noise on one station. When listenting to local stations I have to switch the antenna input to a ribbon antenna mounted behind my tuner because the multi element antenna is directional, in the wrong direction unfortunately and is very noisy. A rotator would solve the problem but I feel that switching antennas is easier than rotating. It depends on your situation and why you need this particular antenna. Since I have only local stations and all distant station are to the south I am considering a tuner with 2 antenna inputs such as the new NAD Silver Series Tuner. Hope this helps.

I agree 100% with Sugarbrie. I live 60 miles north of NYC and using a $20 omni-directional Radio Shack antenna my old Rotel picks up all the stations I could ask for. I mounted outside on the cable end of my house. Ran about 100ft of coax through the attic, into the basement and back up to the tuner. The whole deal with mounting brackets, pole and cable came to around $50.00. Best $50 I ever spent on audio.

I have a roof mounted antenna in my attic crawl space. It is just a TV antenna. For your information, I believe the FM band is between VHF TV channels 6 and 7. Because of this, I have found TV antennas work fine and the fancy FM stuff is not worth the big $$$ expense IMO. ---- The cable TV comes into my house and up into the attic crawl scace. It splits there into multiple cables and down into each room. So all I did was cut the coax cable going to the room with my tuner and connected it to the antenna. The Tuner is just plugged into the cable TV wall socket. Instant great FM. ---- Luckly I live south of Washington DC, so my antenna pointed north gets all the Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding Maryland/Virginia stations with no rotor.