On Mon, 01 Sep 2003 16:25:54 GMT, "George M. Buzzell"
wrote:

I recently came into possession of a radio receiver I purchased for my
father (who passed away- that is why I now have it), an ICOM IC-R7000. The
problem is that when connected to a low gain omnidirectional discone antenna
which I
purchased recently, it does not even have reception as good as my FM home
stereo in the FM band and it doesn't seem to have very good reception at any
other frequency.

Here's the question: do I need some kind of amplifier to make this set work
even to the performance capabilities of my home stereo system?

Hello George,

I am sorry to hear about your father. If he enjoyed the R7000 he must
have been an interesting fellow.

It is unlikely you need an amplifier. Very unlikely. I live deep in a
rural area and hear anything I want to hear with a simple outdoor
antenna.

Check and make sure the ATTENUATOR switches are *not* pushed on your
receiver. I don't recall how they're labeled on the R7000, but they
should not be activated. Tune to something like a local weather
station (162 point something) or any station you can hear, and play
with any ATT adjustments. You may find significant improvement.

Amplifiers, especially consumer/hobby amps, generally add more
problems than they solve. Money is best spent in antennas and decent
feedline and connectors.

If you are in a busy high population area, you may be receiving off
frequency signals (remember any antenna hears any frequency, although
at different degrees of efficiency), and those strong signals may be
overloading your receiver. You don't know if those other signals are
there because they're on a different frequency than the one(s) you're
trying to monitor.

If you live near a tall building with a potent paging transmitter on
the roof, and there are tens of thousands nationwide, that could kill
your receiver over the entire band, whatever it is. If this is the
case, switching in the attenuator might help. It's quick and free to
experiment.

The R7000 is a pretty decent receiver. If it's working properly, it
doesn't need a preamp.

If it's not working properly, adding a preamp is a needless expense.
Have the receiver serviced.

It's probably working.

There are some articles in the White Papers section of our website
discussing antennas and reception. Read some examples of where smaller
antennas resulted in better performance.

You have a nice receiver, nicer than many will ever own.

Regards ... Steve WA3SWS


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Steve Uhrig, SWS Security, Maryland (USA)
Mfrs of electronic surveillance equip
website http://www.swssec.com
tel +1+410-879-4035, fax +1+410-836-1190
"In God we trust, all others we monitor"
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