Aerial

Although I am am a necomer to this forum, I am close to completing a Featherweight after 18 months of construction.

I have recently purchased a 40MHz Car & Boat aerial and GWS PG-03 Gyro from Technobots. What is your preferred method for connecting the aerial to the RC receiver; should the entire length of the RC aerial wire be connected, or can the wire be shortened? Also, should the wire be directly connected to the screw terminal, or capacitively coupled via say a 10nf cap and is it sensible to screen the aerial wire and ground plane the aerial? I appreciate that this is not an exact science and Im not looking for theoretical perfection, but any advice you can give based on your or others practical experience would be most appreciated.

im just asking but did you invent the sinclair C5? :)

It definately does help if you try to keep the whole length of Aeriel cable that came with the Rx, but in robots, especially featherweights, this isnt really very practicle. If you just try to keep the cable as long as will fit you should still be fine.

Try this part of Paul Hills Website:
http://homepages.which.net/~paul.hills/Radio/Radio.htmlhttp://homepages.which.net/~paul.hills/Radio/Radio.html
(god knows what Id do without this mans website!)

Also... are you the guy who created that famous 3 wheeler weve all heard of? :proud:

Clive,
The general rule is you shorten the antenna wire by the length of the 40Mhz Antenna. As for coupling via a 10n cap, that is a matter of trial and error. In practice its seldom needed.
Providing the machine is fairly interference free I.E. motors properly suppressed, radio wiring kept well away from power wiring, that sort of thing then screening and ground plane isnt normally needed.
As Ewan says, You may find the following link handy. Very detailed, but leans heavily towards the theoretical rather than practical

http://homepages.which.net/~paul.hills/Radio/Radio.htmlhttp://homepages.which.net/~paul.hills/Radio/Radio.html

Short version...Common practice usually goes something like.. Mount antenna, attach receiver wire, mount receiver, roll up and secure any surplus receiver wire. Job done!
Hope this is of some help.
Geoff.

Thanks for your very useful advice Geoff and Ewan. Sorry to dissapoint but Im not the the C5 inventor.

i plan to use a zeobot aerial on my robot, will this just bend and be damaged easily? and what other options do i have?

thanks alex

spectrum dx6 ...... no ariel :)

wrong pete...2 tiny aerials:)

Anyway back to the point. Normal arials do get bent, some people put some pneumatic tubing over to give some added protection. But Pete is right the best way is not to have any external ariel and geta 2.4 Ghz system (or 459Mhz like storm or kan opener, but that is v. expensive).

thanks might try and find some tubing, unfortunatly i dont have the money for the spectrum dx6 at the moment but eventually ill get there

thanks alex

Hi Alexander,

Just a thought you may want to try piano wire as an aerial. We have used it on all our robots and in the 4 years its been used on Big Nipper we have only had to replace it about half a dozen times. Once when THz cut it in half and once as I recall when it was severed by a washing machine but thats another story. I am not quite sure which string it is although G string comes to mind, but thats possibly just my mind!

Glyn