My signal strength fell off suddenly a couple days ago. I suffered through 30 minutes of Cleveland Orchestra Shostakovich 10th last night loaded with hiss and background noise. Today I climbed up on the roof and inspected the antenna, something I'm supposed to do every year anyway. I wanted to check for tight ground contacts and mounting lag bolts tight enough. All was well. The Radshack yagi has held up well in 18 months. Connections at the lightning arrestor were also just fine, down at ground level. Maybe I should have checked that first?
So I started thinking maybe something loose in the tuner. It was modded from 300ohm input to an F connector for 75 ohms, but the modder is a good shop, so I wasn't expecting anything wrong inside. When I went to unhook everything so I could take it out of the rack for inspection, the cheapo junk white coax extension that I was using came off in my hand, separated from its connector. The bad performance was lost signal ground from the junky wire. I stuck the junk in there as extension while I tried twisting the room 90 degrees. The room stayed twisted, but the wire never got replaced and finally failed under all that strenuous passing of RF signals. It must have been made like that, the wire has hardly been used for anything. It was junk on arrival. So I ordered 25 more feet of Blue Jeans Quad shield Belden wire with Canare ends. That's what I use coming down from the antenna, but it was too short to reach to new tuner location.
So now I have grounded Antenna > balun 300/75ohm transformer> 50 feet 1694 quad shield cable> Altellicon lightning arrestor at point of entry> 10 feet 1694A into the listening room> Jensen capacitive ground buster > then another 25 feet of 1694 to the tuna.
I underestimated the value of good RF cables and connectors. Quad shield cable is nice to have for high end FM listening. It directly lowers noise floor! The Blue jeans cables are just about the best quality you can get and they are cheap. $31 delivered for the 25 ft extension!
Another day, another audio adventure!
Rich
