Radios in office buildings, and general radio interference

[RetroHacker]

Well, I was rather disappointed a bit ago. This weekend I found a little cheap plastic AA5 tube set at a flea market, broken. One dollar later, I brought it home, dismantled it, and scrubbed and cleaned the case, and replaced the capacitors. This is a simple little RCA Victor All American five set, using miniature tubes. (12BE6, 12BA6, 12AV6, 35W4, 50C5). It's incredibly cheap, mid 60's I'd say. White plastic case, light blue knobs affixed to the front of the cabinet by little black metal retaining rings so that they can't be pulled off (the 'chassis' must be pulled off the knobs, rather than the other way around). The radio is built on a circuit board, mounted in the case at an angle so that the tuning dial can be vertically centered on the cabinet.

I replaced the paper caps, some resistors, and the failed electrolytics, cleaned up the board, and it worked first try. It's a small set, and looked rather good after a lot of scrubbing and cleaning the filthy case, so I brought it into work. In at the office, however, I can only get one station (a religious talk radio station...), and lots of different pitced hums across the dial. With some careful tuning, I could get one other station faintly, but with distortion. I am guessing that I'm picking up interference from the computers, lights, and everything else in the office. So much for listening to Oldies 1240.

So... this leads me to my question - how to get a simple, All American Five set to recieve well (or, at least, somewhat better) in interference-laden areas? I've seen the site on "hot rodding" AA5's, and I think I may try some of his tricks, but I'd like to get the opinion of some of the experts here too.

I'm still keeping a lookout for a simple FM tube set I can bring in, hopefully that will work better. Any reccomendations on what to look for in one of those? I know they made many little cheap FM-only sets in the same manner as the AA5's. I'd love to find one of those. Is there a standard FM circuit for those, as with the AM sets, or is there more variation?

-Ian