I sit in a metal-clad cubicle grid - located and on the opposite side of an ancient masonry building from a few decent AM stations. Every radio I tried had a built in loop antenna : a 1949 Zenith AA6, GE Superadio, Nordemende Turandot all barely picked up anything I could stand for more than a few minutes.
Adding long wire antennas about 20 feet in several directions did not help much at all. Moving sets and antennas just enhanced lots of noise spots between the 3-4 strong local AM fare, all talk-stations
FM does not favor much either, with electronic-fluorescent lighting and other harmonic-spewing switch-mode power-supplied PC, monitors, wallwarts, etc. Only a remote-located antenna at a window, in an attic or on a roof could bring in what is all over the dial outside, in my vehicle.
As a last resort, I brought my full-recapped and aligned but super-simple 1937 Zenith tombstone 5R135 as the daily-driver, with no RF amp stage OR loop antenna, just the 6A8 osc-mixer tube. Guess what? It pulls in E*V*E*R*Y*T*H*I*N*G
with just 10 feet of #24 telecom wire UNDER the carpet.
The radio sits only 1 foot from a laptop but ditching the local loop made all the difference! Clear stations and a few beat-freqs, not noise bursts, as the dial is run end to end. I have a choice of classic or new country, 60s-70s pop and old-time gospel along with every other talker within 50 miles!!! While I remember from Tech-Telecom college that the BC band travels as a ground wave, but I cannot rationalize this.
The point of this thread is: I don't know how many of us figured this out but I only did a month or two ago. And if you are fortunate enough to have some BC stations - actually locally-staffed and playing music, you need to give your older, pre-1940 radio a chance in a forget-about-it location. Maybe its time to see what I get on HF using a more complex pre-war set
