Cheap DIY FM Antenna

Gdoodle, excellent sites. Are you using one of those designs? I'd like to try my hand at making one myself. Does the cable connecting to the cubial have to be 300ohm ribbon feeder cable as well?

Cmk - I am using one such home brew antenna - its hanging on a nail behind my large entertainment unit - out of sight. Hooked up to my 70's vintage Kenwood receiver. Better reception than the store bought thing - but we are in the floor of a valley - hard reception on the low power NPR/classical type stations. I did blow $5 on the 300 ohm ribbon cable - not sure it was worth it. radioshack's is stiff and hard to work with - very hard to strip. Next time I would do that part with speaker wire and see if it sounded alright first.

Gdoole, I'm having trouble locating 300ohm cable. Any suggestions? I was told normal speaker red/black wire would do. Around here, we don't have a radio shack...

CMk - I would just build it with speaker wire - the thing about the 300 ohm cable is that the wires are separated by about a half inch - not sure what this does - but you could simulate this by separating but holding them at half inch with duct tape/electrical tape. I have no idea what the spearation or 300 ohm bit is about - it might be totally unnecessary for short runs. I'll bet it will sound fine with speaker wire. I've built this twice - once with a fancy wooden frame made out of dowels and molding - then the super fast way to build a stationary one - just put four nails in the wall and wrap the wire around in the square configuration... You live somewhere that doesn't have a Radio Shack??? Don't tell me you don't have Starbucks either?...
Note that the ant design has two variations depending on which part of the spectrum you are trying to pickup... I went for the smaller college radio/NPR version.

I am planning to do a DIY antenna with the first set of plans to use with my Tivoli table radio. The instructions are really not clear but I am just going to attempt how I think it is done and see how it works. I will wrap the speaker wire around the X shape (made of 3/4" MDF) then pull tight and tape the two wires together. Then I will just route the two ends toward the center of the X and tape there, strip the ends and connect the balun directly to it. Then just connect an RG6 coax cable and run it down my wall to my radio.