On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 08:11:01PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | I did try shoving things in the extermal antenna port but it didn't | affect range one way or the other. I had a walkman head set and plug | it in. I undid the antenna in my cell phone and plugged it in also | with no added range.
I'm not really surprised that it doesn't help. Looking at the instructions, there's a picture of the antenna (the one you can't buy yet.) It clearly has three connectors on it the plug, just like your stereo walkman headphones. However, antenna jacks only have one or two connectors. So obviously one or two of the connections on the antenna isn't used ... Assuming that two of the connectors are connected to the RF input of the unit (I haven't figured out how to open it without destroying it yet, so I haven't looked inside yet), when you plug your headphones into it, you're connecting to both wires (and your third wire is not connected to anything, or maybe it's connected to one of the other connectors.) So rather than adding an antenna, you're adding a transmission line -- it may be coax, or it may be ladder line, depending on the quality of your headphones. Neither one makes a very good good antenna -- for every signal picked up by one wire, almost exactly the same signal is picked up by the other wire, and so the two cancel each other out. That's what transmission lines are supposed to do ... If you want to make an antenna for it, buy a stereo plug at Radio Shack, and solder an exactly 1 meter wire to _one_ of the connectors. Alas, it's not clear which one is correct (though if two are connected as I suspect, the odds are 2/3 that a random guess will be correct.) You could test that you had the right one before soldering it by just touching it with the wire and seeing what the range looked like. If the range is much better, that's probably the right one. It's also not certain that 1 meter is the correct length -- again I'd need to open it up and look, but the odds are pretty good that it's right. Really, you'd think they'd just make the antenna come with the unit. But I guess they wanted to keep it as cheap as possible ... but the least they could have done is make it available when the unit was available, or use a more standard plug so we can use existing antennas. -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] lp1 on fire RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
