I made my own antenna like Mike's from the Radio Shack parts he indicated. Simply used a 4-40 cap screw self-threaded into the mono jack.
I have played with the unit for the past several weeks at the Ft Wayne OVSS contest, our two SOAR club fields, out and around my home (no flying fields nearby) and at a couple of power fields and found the following: 1. With antenna plugged in but not extended, the number of false positives was about the same as without an antenna. 2. Antenna plugged in and extended, apparently my house radiates on CH32 (no R/C tx's on at the time). 3. At the field, 50 yards from the flight line, antenna extended, checker showed only the channels in use on the line 4. On the flight line, antenna extended, ALL channel led's lit up (swamped). It was most cool to see 6 guys light up all 50 channels. We all got a good chuckle from that! I would suggest that the Channel Checker be used as a device for channel awareness by afixing it near where you would post your frequency pins, etc. In that manner, the number of false positives should remain low and the indications you get should be mostly correct. Keep it away from a concentration of RF energy ... unless you need a night light. If you need qualitative data, need to find spurious and/or off-field transmissions, need to check the radiation of a particular transmitter, get yourself the Channel Analyzer from Aero-Spectra or another lab-quality frequency analyzer. tk --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > >What I found is that it (the Hobbico antenna) does virtually nothing > for range. > > How long is the Hobbico antenna? Tower Hobbies doesn't say. > > My 28-inch homemade antenna makes a definite difference, and it > really > doesn't look very different from the one in the Tower Hobbies > picture. > > Radio Shack Antenna: > http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=270-1405 > > Radio Shack Connector: > http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=274-328 > > My homemade antenna: > http://www.vvsss.com/freq_checker/antenna.jpg > > The Hobbico antenna: > http://www2.gpmd.com/image/h/hcap0341.jpg > > Mike __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
