As usual, my excuses for my spanglish (english words on a spanish frame).

In my humble opinion, old generators need high rpm (medium to high speeds) for delivery a adecuate amount of electricity, and alternators make good power at low speeds. Actual city trafic have bottlenecks and a lot of stops, due it, usually, the generator can't cover the reload demands of the battery, discharging it on the long run (or in less time if many additional electricity loads are running aboard, like lights, fan, and modern stereos). This is the main reason for replace generators with alternators, mainly on cars to be driven usually on city traffic.

Of course, at 70 mph you don't need to worry about it :-)

On the noise way, I have a chinese AM-FM/cassette player on my red Volvo Amazon 121 (a cheap one, with the circuit design similar to old Sony 80's car stereos = good sound, and this one have knobs - and the face is like the 70's radios). The first week the noise was a pain. I change the ignition wires (40 years old, originals) to ones from a old VW beetle (suppressed, but some size chopping was needed), and put a Radio Shack noise supressor (the cilindrical one, with instructions on the back of the package) in the radio's electrical input.

Voila!, now FM is very good, AM has a faint (negigible) noise (only if I am far from the city), and the sounds from cassettes are clear and rich (like the original CDs played in my home stereo).

The supplies involved has low price in my country: cables US$ 5, noise supressor US$ 12, electrical tape US$ 1, plus one hour of work (and enjoyment).

Joaquin Novara
P121 Rojo Amazon
Lima - Peru