All About RC Plane Antennas
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2024
- Do you have questions about your radio control antennas? What part is receiving the signal? How do they need to be oriented? Can the antenna wire have bends? Does it make a difference whether it is horizontal or vertical in the plane? RC Jim does his best to answer these questions and more. Listen, and it's likely that you will learn something!
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As usual ,a very informative and educational review. You can Never learn enough , I always pick up some gems from your videos ,thanks. Bob
Thanks again!
Priceless Jim, really good info. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few examples of how you have your own planes set up. 🇬🇧👍🏻
Sure, Gordon, I would be happy to do that.
1. Well done; however, I'm not sure about the longer antenna being a dipole. I have several receivers where that antenna obviously isn't a dipole; the shield of the cable simply ends about 30mm from the end of the cable and there's a piece of clear heat shrink tubing over it. I consider all of the Spektrum antennas to be simple 1/4 wavelength elements.
2. Since antennas don't transmit or receive much signal off the ends, I never mount the antennas to where they're pointing toward the nose or tail of my planes. As the plane is flying away from me, the antenna would receive very little signal.
3. The better Spektrum transmitters actually have a receiver module with one or two antenna elements inside them. It's there for the wireless buddy box system and is what lets you bind one transmitter to another. It might also receive telemetry from your plane, but I'm not sure about that.
Checking into it further, I think you are right about Spektrum. Clearly their present models are monopoles, and looking at their product list carefully, I don't see any sleeved linear dipoles. My old AR636A has something on it that I thought was a sleeved linear dipole, but in examining it closer, I think that part is just a crimped on mounting point. However, according to www.rchelicopterfun.com/rc-antenna.html Hitech, Jeti and other manufacturers are using sleeved dipoles on their telemetry enabled receivers. On that website they state that many of the Spektrum two wire receivers - where the antenna wires are directly opposite each other and in line with each other - are two wire dipoles, as I described in my video. The AR6210 would be an example of one of those. But it is a discontinued model. Thank you so very much for your input. You have taught me something!
I'm scratching my head again. I happened across a video where a hobby shop owner was comparing some old Spektrum receivers with the new internal antenna models. One of the old was was the AR400, and it had the same thing on the antenna that my AR636A has. Looking up the AR400, they list one of its key features as: "Antenna is amplified for greater signal clarity." That sure sounds like a dipole antenna, and it certainly is linear...
@@RCJim I haven’t seen any of those brands that use a sleeved dipole. I made a sleeved dipole many years ago for the FM stereo receiver at work. The impedance at the center of a dipole is 70 ohms with no reactance, so 75 ohm coax works pretty well. And, a sleeved dipole looks fairly decent hanging from the wall of a shop.
@@RCJim Hmmm, I have an old AR636A that I can peel the heat shrink off of to see what’s under it. I can’t register or reprogram it, so I might as well.
@@RCJim Under the heat shrink is a circuit card about 4mm wide and 15mm long. It has one 8-pin microcircuit that's about 2mm square and several surface mount resistors, capacitors, and perhaps inductors. I would say it's a pre-amp. It's definitely not the other half of a dipole antenna.