Friends, Romans.. And all the rest

right OK I live about 6/8 miles from the airport as the crow (A320?) flies under the glide path at Aberdeen. I live in mastrick and for those that know Aberdeen you will realize that there's a dirty big hill in the way called Northfield. I'm not sure if this hampers things or not but to the point. Am I expecting too much for my scanner to be able to work in my house, I have a IC-R5 which I can never seam to get the pilots and ground on at the same time, one talks fine and the other is just crackle, I thought it was the R5s problem so while at lossiemouth i noticed my mate had a scanner that was going through all these channels and splurting out the tower and pilots very clear while the anteni was not extended so i thought great when that's at full I'm bound to get it clear in my house. so I bought myself what he had a yupiteru MVT-7100. But again it does not work in my house. so are the chances that no hand held scanner will work in my house?

My R5 sort of works if I tie a bit of metal wire around the connector and sling it over the curtain rail but that's not very handy. Any advice on which one I should keep? Or buy instead