RC Airplane World Forum

hi all. hope you can help .had to replace my receiver in my boat ,my question is can i just solder new ariel cable from new receiver to the old one .will solder be ok
and will it affect the range
many thanks simon

anyone

Hi,

There should be no problem soldering new aerial wire to your receiver, just ensure its the correct length, eg, total length to match existing cable.

Lee

I'm no expert on it.
But I would have to agree with EB52.
Try to keep it the same length.
I have a CB in my weekend offroad toy (fullsize) and you have to keep the coax for the antenna a certain length and tune the antennas for them to work properly and not burn out the CB itself.

I also remember having an old receiver in one of my R/C cars way back when and it's antenna wire was changed and was not the same length as the original. It never had any good range after that.
On a car not too much of a big deal, it just stops, glitches, or crashes. Walk over and pick it up.
On a boat, you might have to go for a swim to get it back.

Once you fix it try doing a range test on it like we do for planes. Either have someone hold it (warn 'em about the prop!I'm sure some of those high powered boats can have a good go at a misplaced finger), or set it up on a stand of some sort and get as far as you would need to be and make sure everything still works properly.

Good luck!

I've done it a couple of times in the past, worked fine. As has already been said, just make sure you match the original antenna length, and make the solder joint a good one.

if anything its a little longer .would that be ok

depends on your definition of 'a little longer'. Without going too much into the technicalities, the length of the antenna is determined by the frequency of transmission, for example 35Mhz, So the optimum length (half wave 6.6ft) is calculated to oscillate efficiently to that frequency, however, most if not all Rx receivers have slightly shorter length wire, ( not practical to have a 6 foot long wire on a park flier!) but this is compensated with the addition of a tuned RF coil. I think someone somewhere did some experiments lengthening the antenna to obtain better range, I'll see if I can find the article.
Sorry to waffle on, it may may OK to lengthen it a tad, just don't shorten it as that will reduce effective range.

no its only 10 inch thats all (the ariel that is ) longer

Thats a relief

the average length is 1 metre for 35mHz. i just found mention of that experiment. It was a Spanish guy, not Pete, he was experimenting with different lengths and managed a FPV flight of 18 kilometres

http://www.aeromodelismovirtual.com/showthread.php?t=269&page=4

you may need to translate as its in Spanish I use google page translator.

As yours is for a boat, the experiment is really academic but it does show that lengthening the antenna wire should be OK.