Furthest reception from your tuner and how?


I am moving to a remote location - about 4 hours from San Francisco and 6 hours from Portland. There is some radio, but... I'm curious. A few questions for you tuner guru guys:

What equipment do you use?
Modded or stock?
How many filter and gangs, antennas, sleuths, etc.?
What's the most remote signal you have been able to pull?
How has it sounded?
Any thoughts on things you would try if given the opportunity?
biomimetic
Arrrrggggggghhhh!!!!!! What is this, a pirate thing? I once read that the Sansui Tu-X1 could pull signals in from Mars, but maybe that was on AM.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?hbest&939943562&openflup&73&4#73
I just hate fmtunerinfo; "if it's not Kenwood, it's crap" seems to be their motto. Plus, the problem with modding tuners these days like on fmtunerinfo is that as HD radio is encroaching on the low-rez bands, it's getting harder to do a good mod without capturing all that digital hash that's not decoded in the lo-rez spectrum.

How tall are most towers to earth curvature? (i.e. - what's the natural parallax v. tower height?) is hardly argumentative. I know it's further than 80-90 miles which makes me wonder about "signal sleuth"-type boosting of signals to signal fade ratios. Not knowing is fine; I just don't want to get in to "tuner shootout" territory. Being 200 some odd miles from a source means it won't work; that's obviously too far, if it's about Earth parallax, but I wonder if 120 miles or so might work in the right circumstances.

Also: not a pirate thing.

Use a big directional rotatable antenna had occured to me. Does anyone know anything about station signal power and how it relates to tuner gangs, spec's, quieting, how the tuner actually goes about acquiring the signal?

Nobody's actually answered my question:

What's the most distant signal you've acquired and how?

Bio,

I think you are going a tad overboard with the criticism of the fmtunerinfo site. They don't all just like Kenwood. There is one guy, I believe named Jim Rivers, who evaluated a variety of tuners in his own personal system and he happened to think that the Kenwood L-02T was the best. If you go into the website and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the FM Tuner forum, you can ask this same question and I'm sure you'll get a slew of reasonable answers. The FM forum members consist of a lot of FM techs who know their stuff. Most of these guys aren't audiophiles, so to speak, but they know their tunas and I'm sure would answer all your questions with informative answers. I was kidding about the pirate thing.
I think some of the basic info is good, especially about DIY - I'm not out to get them or anything, but I find other people quoting them "like the bible of tuners says...", and it's not. All audio clubs have biases and I happen to think a useful sampling of what's going on on ebay or 'gon helps people that are pulling things out of the attic either to sell or maybe, hopefully, use. I saw an L-02T recently for $30, and it was working. I passed for some reason. I've been kicking myself since.

I'm sort of sorry this forum has degenerated into this, when I really wanted either tall tales or "you won't believe this, but I got a signal from way far away...". Anyone? Please? Bueller...?
Bio,

I'm also a former Eugenean, now in Florence. I lived in Ferry Street Bridge and Whiteaker and never got any Portland stations, but when I moved into the South Hills facing north I could get a few, not listenable though. I knew a guy who lived near the top of Spencer Butte with a big yagi who could get fairly decent Portland. If you're moving to southern OR/northern CA, I can't imagine where you could live and get an antenna high enough to get Portland or SF.

KWVA now streams at 320K which is at least as good as most broadcast signals, and KRVM now has an AACplus stream that is also very good. KLCC is at 80K which is quite listenable. KWAX is at 192K and is also terrific. What more do you need?