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Handeling long antenna cable

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I have a very long antenna wire at the 40mhz RX. Is it common to wind it around the antenna tube and tighten it with shrinking tube or shal it fly in the wind? I dont want to work against working radius.

All advices welcome : )

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I believe the recommended thing is to insert it inside the tube to the tip, and anything left is wound up inside the car.

Reception works best when the tip/end that is unshielded is vertical.

Winding or putting a cap over the top, folding the excess wire down is not good.

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Thanks. As I have a carbon chassis, I think its also not good to keep a long part of the wire inside the shell. So I just let it hang loose.

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My understanding is it’s only the top unshielded part that is used, so curling the bottom section up doesn’t matter.

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6 hours ago, Cynan said:

My understanding is it’s only the top unshielded part that is used, so curling the bottom section up doesn’t matter.

That's for 2.4ghz, old AM and FM need a certain length of wire but if it is way to long you can wind the lower bit around a piece of card or plastic.

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Antenna length is an interesting issue. Intuitively we know from looking at our different radio sets that different frequencies work best with different antenna lengths. And we also know intuitively that the higher the frequency, the shorter the aerial needs to be.

However there is a bit more to it than that. An antenna optimised for 40MHz would in theory have a total dipole length of over 11 feet - clearly impractical for model purposes. So what we typically see on RC sets designed for model use are antennas that are optimised for a harmonic of the frequency being used. When choosing an antenna length, I find this calculator quite useful:

http://mustcalculate.com/electronics/harmonics.php?f=40M

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