Some houses are wrapped with a metallic foil backing on the insulation. It has a tendency to turn your house into a “Faraday Cage”. This may help reduce splurious rf emissions coming from outside the house interfering with electrical equipment inside the house, but it doesn’t help when there’s a scanner sitting on the desk with the stock antenna it came with. The paper clip suggestion dealt with simulcast issues where a couple of transmitting sites might be strong and mixing with each other. The paper clip would have an antenna toon effect, reducing signal strength, with the hope one site would then win out over the other and give you intelligible audio. But I believe your post related to nothing heard. Glad the mobile antenna worked outside… wondering if it would work inside?
PS. I haven’t seen any mobile directional antennas that need to be “pointed” in the direction of the transmitting site. They are Omni-directional, just stick it up vertically as high as you can get it-it will receive equally well from all directions provided there are no obstacles between the antenna and transmitting sites.
