Is it just me or is the radio reception really bad? When I'm in town and tune to some stations I can hear two and even sometimes three other stations bleeding over. The further I get from the stations the better it seems to get. Once I'm out of town I can usualy get pretty good reception. Also it seems that when the car is in motion the reception is a lot worse than when I'm stopped.

...sounds like your car's antenna is a strong antenna - I had the same problem.. Remove the antenna booster and it should definately get better.
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

I'm pretty sure you're right, I noticed that I'm now getting a station about 200 miles away that I have never been able to get before. I'll remove it tonight and let you know how it works.

sounds like your car's antenna is a strong antenna - I had the same problem.. Remove the antenna booster and it should definately get better.

I've just tried this out, and reduced the length of my aerial by about 50% in length. BINGO!!! Instant, very definite improvement.

Of all the things I have tried to improve the radio reception, this is something that had just absolutely not occurred to me - reducing the received RF level. Congratulations, sir, on finding the answer !!! I am now pulling in FM stations from Germany, and from Belgium, for goodness' sakes!! [200km+??]

Hugo has also sneaked in a number of definite improvements to the tuner software - well done, it looks great, and works well. I have improved RDS text handling too; great stuff. I noticed that the number of decimal places in the station frequency has gone up to 2 - is this a sign that you are going to start tuning by 0.01 or 0.05 MHz increments?

What's the mysterious silent station at 96 MHz that comes in at 5 bars? Anything to do with Acorns?

Is there a set of release notes for the 8C version of the radio similar to John's notes for the equaliser, Hugo?

The unit still has the problem that it is unable to discriminate well between adjacent stations, and absolutely not between local and distant stations on similar frequencies. Given that the tuner module has got a control function for Local/Remote selection, how about a button assignment on the remote (and a small on-screen icon to indicate the mode) to select Local/Remote as desired? This would make for vastly improved round-town usage. What about it, Hugo ?

radioshack here in town sells a de-boosting adapter..not sure how much that'd help though..
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

Hoi Henno!

You could look for an signal matching adaptor; I found one that is suitable for FM, which is just a small coil transformer that allows you to adjust the amount of signal going through it. This is an off the shelf module from my local electronics shop, but it was big-time expensive. When I opened it, it was just a miniature FM tuner transformer and a couple of connectors, which could have been bought seperately for about a quarter of the price as loose components. If you're not scared of soldering, then all you need is a miniature FM tuner core, a bit of shielded 75 ohm coax and two connectors. If you are interested, I could try and sketch this and post it here.

It was an Altai brand; I didn't use it after I found I could just collapse the aerial to half it's length and get excellent results.

Are you sure that the built in antenna is not adjustable for RF gain? My friend across the back here had a Volvo amplified antenna built in to his car that we discovered could be adjusted with a little twiddle pot on the case.

Hi Rob,

Great machine ain't it! I alread started to blame the empeg team for focussing overlooking he FM part, when it turns out that reducing the input signal improves reception. I know, you discoverd this before, but I found it hard to believe . Took me 6 weeks or so to remove the booster and, bingo, FM is acceptable

Advice to anyone with poor reception: Try it out; remove the (empeg supplied) booster and/or shorten the antenna

I'll ask the garage if the amplifier output is adjustable; doubt it though, so if you could sketch up a design, I'll clean it up and post it for general use.