Evening

I had to ditch the antenna on the roof of my car.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I had sh*te AM/FM radio reception, just about picking up Radio1 in some areas if I was lucky!

So I had some coax with a DIN connector on the end for the stereo, and soldered ~0.75m of wire to both the inner, and outer core of the coax. Creating a 1/4 wave dipole antenna for it

Anyway, this picks up the radio lovely! I can have the wire attached to the core vertical in the car without any troubles, but of course the one attached to the braid cannot also be vertical (and opposing the other) due to the height inside the car - seems to work well enough horizontal though.

I was wondering however, the one attached to the coax braid, should I ground the end to the vehicle body? Or leave it as it is as a kind of dipole, but with each element in a different plane?

Any thoughts/help appreciated

 

wont it be grounded by the connection via the radio chassis ?

does 0.75m make a 1/4 wave on 96-108 ? Sounds long to me

 

There abouts!

If we take 99.5Mhz, for Radio1 then:

300M/99.5M = 3.01m (wavelength), and 1/4 wave is 0.75m.

Think I'll just leave it as it is then