Antenna Advice?

[leadlike]

I have an RCA 8k that I have all fixed up and aligned. I was wondering what kind of antenna would be appropriate to put inside of the cabinet to get the best performance on the am band (though picking up some stuff on shortwave would be nice as well).

As found, the cabinet had a piece of #18 stranded insulated wire stapled around the perimeter. No idea if this is stock or not. I just got to thinking about this, as I sat looking at my Zenith with its fancy cardboard box wavemagnet, it certainly picks up more stations than the RCA.

[radio nut]

How big is this radio? if it is a table top you might have to hide wire behind something else. It really should not need that much.

[leadlike]

I posted this over on the Antique Radios.com forum as well. I had a couple of responses, and the consensus was that short of climbing up onto your roof, and mounting a tuned antenna, that the best antenna for a set of this design would just be to simply hook up the biggest hank of wire you could fit inside of the cabinet. So, after stringing about thirty feet of the stuff in the speaker compartment, I called it done.

I installed this set yesterday in a house up in Harrisburg, the reception was okay, until we turned off a halogen light that was on the same circuit, and it came to life. A pretty hot little receiver.