Griffin Radio Shark: Poor AM reception

Yesterday we noted a report from a reader experiencing extremely poor AM performance with Griffin Technology's RadioSHARK (a combination hardware tuner/software package that allows you to "TiVo" radio on your Mac). We've since received a good number of additional reports from other readers, all confirming this issue. Most note that other AM radios work fine in the same location, and that FM reception using the RadioSHARK is good. A typical response comes from Craig Watters:

"Craig Watters: I have the same problem with AM reception as Doug Weiss. FM seems to work fine, but AM is garbled, if there is reception at all. I know the stations are capable of reception as I have no problem on any other radio (they are local Denver stations)."

Griffin aware of the problem; AM antenna may help Reader Len Wines evidently spoke to someone from Griffin last week at Macworld Expo about this issue; he was told that an AM antenna might help with reception, but wasn't told where such an antenna might be purchased:

"I talked with a less than knowledgeable rep from Griffin at Macworld last week, who said that [the RadioSHARK] did have an AM antenna connection. But he had no idea if an antenna from Griffin was in the works. He said they were sending people to Radio Shack. I asked him for what, but he didn't know. I know of no Radio Shack item that would work since the antenna needs to terminate in a mini-8 male plug. I do have a very long mini-8 wire connected, but it improved reception almost not at all."

Replacement unit better? As we noted in yesterday's coverage, a replacement unit from Griffin didn't fix the problem for the reader in question; however, Eric Ross appears to have had much better luck in swapping his RadioSHARK out for a new one:

"I had a Radioshark with bad AM reception (very noisy, could barely hear the strongest stations). The latest software update helped a bit but the sensitivity was still poor. I tried it both with an iBook and a PC laptop while walking outside around the house in case I had a noisu appliance or something. Griffin sent a replacement and it fixed the problem. AM reception works fine with the new unit."

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