Surprisingly Excellent Indoor/Outdoor FM Antenna -- Highly Directional

Even though it's not "meant" for FM radio reception, I've found that the Clearstream 2v HDTV antenna is a fabulous performer, even when used indoors.

If you're in need of a great, directional FM indoor antenna and don't want to bother doing the "right" thing (that is... putting up an outdoor yagi FM antenna on a rotor), this antenna will give you surprisingly excellent results.

Many Walmart's have them and also many BestBuys. This makes it easy to "try" one to see if it works well in your environment.

Why I bought one:
I had one of these hooked as an over-the-air antenna to my TV set while I was in Chicago on assignment last year. Most HDTV antennas are optimized for UHF reception. Since WBBM-TV in Chicago is one of the few digital VHF stations (they stupidly were assigned to VHF channel 12 when the digital changeover occurred) , I needed an antenna that could pull in VHF as well. The ClearStream 2V was the best choice for pulling in WBBM in a fringe area.

Just as an experiment:
Just on a hunch, a month or so ago, I hooked the Clearstream 2V to my McIntosh MR-88 FM tuner just to see if it could pull anything in. I was sure that most of it's directionality (the more directional an antenna is, the more "signal reception" abilities it has) was optimized for the TV UHF band and that directionality on VHF (especially at frequencies as low as the FM band) would have been mediocre at best.

I hooked it to the FM tuner with about 25 feet of RG-6 coax so I could move it around my listening room.

I was shocked to hear that stations were flooding in from as far away as Grand Rapids (110 miles), Kalamazoo (75 miles), Chicago (95 miles), and Fort Wayne (85 miles). Turning the antenna around to different positions would null out a station from one direction and bring in another station from a different direction on the same frequency. Compared to my old Radio Shack FM rabbit ears, this thing was amazing.

I can consistently and comfortably listen to WFMT, WLS-FM,or WXRT out of Chicago on the Clearstream 2V antenna next to one of the windows in my listening room.... something that I never thought was possible. If I move it to another side of the listening room, the stations from Grand Rapids come in perfectly (and the Chicago ones fade into the static)...

Again, I would use a good long length of RG-6 coax to hook this up to your tuner. Since it's so directional, numerous possibilities will exist in your listening room. In some parts of my listening room, I can't pull in a station. Moving it elsewhere brings it in perfectly. So, if you want to experiment with this antenna, hook it to a loooooonnnnng piece of coax that'll reach all parts of your listening room.

If you want to try out my findings for yourself, these antennas are available at WalMart or BestBuy. Since antennas perform differently in different situations, I'd strongly recommend that you buy one of these locally, even though they're cheaper by mail order. That way, it's easy to return if it doesn't work for you. I think though that you'll be pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Clearstream 2V antenna on FM.

 

Thanks for the tip, I will get one and try it with my tuners.

 

Just the tip I needed, thanks. I bought a vintage Luxman tuner to go with my Luxman integrated amp. Can't hardly pull anything in here in L.A.. I was just about ready to sell the Zlucnan and exclusively stream internet ratio, but I'll give this a try.

 

Great timing. I was looking for a new antenna myself, and that looks like a winner. There is no such thing as a "digital antenna", but that's the buzzword you must use if you want to sell an antenna in 2015.

 

These look nice.....I like the indoor option. Just got a Fisher 400 back from it's refurbishing trip.....I am hoping the FM sounds glorious, although I don;t listen to it much. There is a great classical station near me though.

I wonder.....I have an old dish network satellite on the roof still.....the dish is metal.....might just attach the coax that's already run to my room to the dish itself and see what I get....might work well up there on the roof.

 

I hate to break the bad news to you but this antenna's max. gain on VHF is only 3.1 dBi at a frequency of 216 MHz which is far away from the FM band:

https://www.antennasdirect.com/cmss_files/attachmentlibrary/Technical Data PDF's/C2 VHF-TDS.pdf

You would probably have greater success with a simple FM dipole antenna that is typically included with FM receivers for far less cost: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Axis-700-500-FM-Dipole-Antenna/21732223

 

WFMT broadcasts 6 kW and WLS-FM 4.4 kW.
Both from atop the Willis (Sears) Tower at a height of about 470 meters!

https://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/fmq?call=WFMT
https://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/fmq?call=WLS-FM

WXRT broadcasts 6.7 kW from atop of the John Hancock tower at a height of about 400 meters!

https://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/fmq?call=WXRT

At these heights your reception location probably has a direct line-of-sight path to these powerful tranmitter's antennas.

 

You beat me to it, although I would never recommend WallyMart for anything. The Dipole is the king for FM when you don't need a deep fringe outdoor antennae. It is directional and also forgiving enough to allow the omni-directional reception of many local stations. Not that there are many decent local stations any longer, if I wanted to hear the, just bunching-up a dipole behind the audio rack usually works fine for local stations. For more distant stations, you can raise it up and stretch it out, rotating it to find the best directional field for a particular distant station that you prefer.
-Bill

 

Huh.

I was just thinking yesterday yet again about FM antennas, since I would like to get the lovely KKJZ (http://jazzandblues.org/) but they are medium far down in Long Beach and also some hills block the way.

 

http://www.fmfool.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=29

30,000 Watts http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/patg?id=KKJZ-FM

 

(I'm the original poster of this thread)....
Despite the quoting of specs above, this antenna performed much better for me in reception of 102.1 (an HD-IBOC with 2 subchannels station) in Kalamazoo (the station that I tested on) than a dipole hanging in the same position.

The antenna position for optimum reception of this station was about 20 feet from my tuner.

I wired the both antennas with quad-shielded RG-6 cable using a 75/300 matching transformer to hook the dipole to (the Clearstream 2V did not require a balun for hookup).

Both antennas were flat against the window of my living room (where the tuner was). The dipole was strung across the window and fastened at both ends by a little bit of duct tape.

Switching back and forth, by plugging each antenna into the tuner, 102.1's HD/IBOC signal was immediately "heard" by the McIntosh MR-88 tuner/Clearstream and the tuner was immediately able to receive both HD/IBOC subchannels with no breaks in the audio. The dipole did not allow ANY HD/IBOC reception of 102.1.

Soooooo.... IMHO, The best thing to do when deciding on which antenna is "better" is to get a hold of the two antennas (in this case, a wire dipole and the Clearstream 2V), hook 'em up, and see which gives you better results. Since you can buy the Clearstream at absolutely no risk from your local BestBuy or Walmart, the best course of action when trying to improve reception is to try 'em out.