Having spent a lot of time playing with the new Digital-Radio-for-Raspberry-Pi board, I quickly ran into problems with radio reception with the supplied telescopic antenna. I’m in a rural area and although I could get reasonable reception upstairs in the house, I could get absolutely NOTHING in my electronics lab. I was starting to go mad, but I realized that I had quite good FM reception on my HiFi FM receiver - using a very skimpy and cheap ‘Y’ antenna hooked onto the wall.
OK, I thought, nothing to loose - lets try it. Two problems
- The ‘Y’ antenna has a UHF TV plug on it (not a neat SMA one)
- DAB+ in France is vertically polarized, and my FM antenna is horizontal…
I made a horrible kluge for problem 1
And just unhooked one end of the antenna for problem 2
(and, yes, my windows are very dirty)
And it works! So if you’re having problems with reception, start with a few experiments !
I will eventually be installing a proper outside DAB+ antenna, but for the time being this works well enough.