Thoughts on antennas...

[phantom240]

Okay, so when putting my stereo back together, im going to need to repair my antenna jack.. i have a window mount antenna that works great, but my ******* friend caught the wire with his shoe and yanked it out of the stereo... luckily the stereo wasnt damaged... but now i get ****** reception as compared to before, so i think i need to repair the wire. Anyways i was wondering if since i still have my aftermarket antenna in my OEM location along with my window mount, is there any way i can use BOTH of them at the same time? dual antenna style?

[phantom240]

come on...

[azbass]

Okay, so when putting my stereo back together, im going to need to repair my antenna jack.. i have a window mount antenna that works great, but my ******* friend caught the wire with his shoe and yanked it out of the stereo... luckily the stereo wasnt damaged... but now i get ****** reception as compared to before, so i think i need to repair the wire. Anyways i was wondering if since i still have my aftermarket antenna in my OEM location along with my window mount, is there any way i can use BOTH of them at the same time? dual antenna style?

what kinda car. you can probably just replace a section of of the cable that goes in to teh radio.

[phantom240]

... well its a 91 nissan 240sx. The OEM antenna wire is not my main concern, its my aftermarket windo mount unit that im worried about. Is there any way i can check to see if it still has good connections at the plug with a dmm or somehting? also, using dual antennas would be a neat idea imo and most cars today use them. For instance my 90 acura legend had foil on the rear window like defrosters use, but it was hooked into the antenna circuit, as well as a power antenna. Besides im a ***** for SQ and the better reception i can get, the more ***** like i can be!

[azbass]

hmm sq and fm reception..

might as well go HD radio. ...

[JimJ]

Even if you were parked next to the transmitter, you'd still only get audio from 50Hz to 15KHz...not exactly SQ

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by a window mount, though...

[cyantist]

One antenna is enough, I really don't see the advantage of running two.. It's not going to give you better range or anything, and I'm not sure how you would run them together anyways.. Actually, it might make your reception worse since your deck was not designed to run 2 antennas..

And why are you talking about better SQ and radio?

[cyantist]

Oh, and I've never heard of a car running 2 antennas for radio reception, so I don't know where you are getting the idea that most cars today use them..

[JimJ]

I really don't see the advantage of running two.. It's not going to give you better range or anything, and I'm not sure how you would run them together anyways..

Only reason I can think of is an active array-kind of deal, where multiple antennas are run for noise canceling. But that requires extra hardware and precise planning.

Otherwise, the only way to combine antennas that works is by co-phasing them, which involves placing the verticals exactly a quarter-wavelength apart and feeding them with electrically-equal lengths of feedline. This is what you see on semi trucks with CB antennas on either mirror, just so happens that the width of a typical rig is about a quarter wave on 27MHz. That tends to smooth out the pattern, make it more omnidirectional with less nulls.

I don't know...

[cyantist]

Thanks Jim.. I knew there was a good reason, I just didn't know the specifics..