Motorola mcs tuner
Nighttime reception becomes very long distance. The range is not so great as to cause a lot of interference from stations in distant cities. Daytime reception is good for local stations, with a range similar or a little further than FM's range.
With AM, daytime and nighttime reception are very different cases. And there are still some worthwhile music stations on AM. Even though most of these examples are talk-oriented, a better-sounding AM tuner makes the listening more pleasurable. I listen regularly to NPR, unavailable in Canada, from WNED-AM, a Buffalo, New York station.
Others will find AM essential to pick up a station or information that they can't get on a local FM station. The old Chevy only had AM, but listening to WLS in Chicago and other stations would keep me awake. For me, AM also reminds me of my youth, with late nights spent trying to drag in distant stations on a homemade set, or the drive from Cincinnati back to Cleveland late on Sunday night after visiting my wife-to-be at grad school. In fact, AM is "funkier" with all manner of oddball programming that wouldn't be mainstream enough for FM. Programming on AM is different from FM with an emphasis on talk radio for sports, news, politics and personal advice. In fact, why would you want anything more? There are a lot of high-end FM tuners that have the bare bones of an AM section added just so that you can pick up a little talk radio. Usually the performance bar for AM was set pretty low.
Motorola mcs tuner plus#
In the tube days, millions of AC/DC radios were sold with four-tube plus rectifier layouts.
A superheterodyne tuner can be achieved with three transistors and a diode, or a single IC. The AM broadcast band is at the noisy end of the RF spectrum, so phenomenal sensitivity isn't required. RF amplification is plentiful, demodulation can be extremely simple. This is an important point to make regarding AM: it's actually pretty easy to make a functioning AM tuner. Benefits are that AM was a very easy modulation scheme to use in the early radio days and, more importantly, very easy to receive and demodulate. You can actually see the waveform of the audio impressed on top of the carrier. A carrier frequency (the nominal frequency that you tune to such as "1210 on your AM dial") has its amplitude modulated with the intended audio signal.
But first a bit of background.ĪM stands for amplitude modulation. There were, and still are, exceptions, and these are what will interest us most. When FM became popular, for the most part, focus shifted to FM tuner design, and AM sections became a low-cost add-on feature of barely acceptable performance. The hi-fi boom of the '50s became synonymous with the new LP and FM broadcasting, both being pushed by the new component hi-fi set makers. Still, FM wouldn't become a factor until well after WWII and AM sets continued to evolve. AM radio served the nation well, but a desire for greater fidelity and immunity from atmospheric interference got experimenters (specifically Edwin Armstrong) working on the FM process. By the 1930s, the early phase of technology was maturing with superheterodyne radios and receivers being the norm and some great sets being made by communications specialists like Hammarlund and Hallicrafters and by radio set makers such as E.H. Our contributor David Smith (not to be confused with David "Anonymous" or David Rich) kicks things off with this essay.ĪM radio has a long, rich history, with the first commercial U.S. Granted to quote our text so long as proper credit is given.ĮBay listings that quote us incorrectly or without credit may be