Helpful hint on AM reception

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

        If, like me, you have a fancy "tuner" or "receiver" as the
centerpeice of your home stereo, but the AM reception is really bad, you
might try this. I had tried attaching various wires and such, including the
SW long-wire antenna hanging out back, to the terminal on the back for an
AM antenna without much success. So, I took a short length of stranded
copper wire, scrapped some paint off a little patch of the nearby
old-fashioned, cast-iron heating radiator and attached the wire to it. It
boosts the signals on AM dramatically. I guess all the heating pipes and
radiators in my house are now an antenna. I imagine you could try the same
thing with the copper pipes in the water supply system. This worked so
well, I'm surprised I've never seen it mentioned anywhere in articles about
antennas. You can't directionalize this, of course, but it strengthens
whatever signal or signals are there.