The short answer is that anything that works for you is OK. With a portable radio such as that, really big antennas are generally counterproductive because the radio amplifies whatever comes in on an antenna so much that if you add too much wire, you end up overloading the radio which causes distorted sound and signals coming in where they don't actually exist as well as a problem of very strong signals overwhelming weak ones you might want to hear. If you have any way of grounding the radio, that will help reception. Listening at night on the lower bands (9 mhz and below) should yeild lots of good listening, and in the daytime, the upper bands might be more productive. Good listening

All life all holiness come from you O Lord
Brio




"littbarski" wrote in message ups.com...
Hi there,

I really don't know much about shortwave / DX, but I have bought the
Siemens RK 661 (Sangean 808) some weeks ago. Now I have time to use it
an get used to it.
So it works best with an external antenna. I have a compact antenna
from Grundig (came with a YB400), but this don't work very good. Now i
tested a lot and found out that it works pretty good with a normal
stereo jack extension cable (4 meters), that I put on some good
positions in my room.
Is this a known "antenna trick"? I mean, I don't know anything about
shortwave antennas, so I would like to know if - with this kind of
nearly NO effort - there is another way to improve this solution I
found a little? or ist this already all I can do, if I don't want (and
can't) build a "real" antenna.

thank you!
littbarski