Learning

Preamplifiers are often touted as an easy solution to improve one’s reception, and in ideal conditions, they can indeed help. In practice however, they often cause more problems than they fix, so care must be exercised in their use. Preamplifiers (also commonly referred to as Low Noise Amplifiers, or LNAs) tend to amplify everything, whether…

The proper grounding of a radio feed is often overlooked on many radio feeds; however, is an essential part of protecting the host and optimizing receive performance. Furthermore, it is required by the National Electric Code. By properly grounding a radio feed’s antenna system, you prevent the build-up of static electricity around the antenna during…

Radio frequency filtering is an often overlooked aspect of radio feeds that can greatly enhance the listening experience. Although not always necessary, situations in which there are strong transmissions on adjacent frequencies can lead to some less than desirable situations: Some common sources of strong adjacent transmissions to railroad voice communications are NOAA weather transmitters,…

Selecting the appropriate receiver for your radio feed is crucial to avoiding conditions like desense, third order intermodulation, and overload. Some of the more important receiver specifications include sensitivity and selectivity. Sensitivity is the receiver’s ability to hear weak transmissions, while selectivity is the receiver’s ability to withstand strong adjacent transmissions. There are other receiver…