Radio and Electronics Cookbook

17

Receiving aerials for amateur radio

Introduction

For any radio receiver to work well, it must have some form of antenna, or aerial. In almost all domestic transistor radios, the aerial is built into the set, either as a ferrite rod (which looks like a rod of dark grey metal) on which are wound coils of wire, or as a chromium-plated telescopic metal rod. Some radios have both forms of aerial, using the ferrite rod aerial for long waves (LW) and medium waves (MW) and the metal rod for very high-frequency (VHF) stations using frequency modulation.

There’s broadcast reception…

No aerial is perfect, and these two types are far from perfect! As in most mass-produced equipment, they serve their purpose, which is not critical, and they allow ...