Manual antenna & reception

[level9]

I ran into a reception issue on my manual antenna.

 

First, some context. Many years ago my manual antenna was damaged.

I bought an aftermarket one which I noted at the time was missing the metal tube that extended down into the fender.

Nonetheless it mounted up just fine, was stable enough and I didn't notice any kind of reception issues so I let it be.

However. I lived mostly in the big cities.

 

Now that I'm relocating to the mountains I noticed that all of my other cars seemed to have better reception, even with their tiny, hidden away antennas.

I noted the antenna I had on the Pathfinder was the proper 1/4 FM wavelength (OEM standard size) and, obviously, much bigger and more exposed to pick up clean signals than these other cars.

So, something must be wrong. Specifically, I noted signal reception in the lower band of FM was the weakest.

This simply didn't make any sense to me because the antenna is already the proper division of length based on everything I know about antennas and reception.

 

I went ahead and explained the situation while noting the difference in antennas to our new AI overlords (ChatGPT) and asked what could possibly be going on.

It spit back a bunch of goblygook about capacitive couplings between the antenna and the sheet metal in the fender and so forth which frankly sounded pretty insane to me especially considering extending the antenna into the fender seemed to violate the rules around aligning wavelengths. In any case it noted missing the tube extension would impair reception of the lower band of FM - which happened to be my issue.

 

So I went ahead and ordered a new OEM manual antenna (w/ tube extension). Installed it, and, sure enough, that solved the problem. Reception was boosted across the board but dramatically at the lower bands of FM. So if anyone else is having the issue, there's your fix - make sure you have the fender extension. I don't think this applies to auto antennas as (from parts catalog diagrams) it seems to already be fairly extended down into the fender.

 

 

 

[adamzan]

That's interesting to know... I grabbed that part when I scrapped my old 1995, but my current one has the power antenna. My old 1994 had some ford looking one that a body shop installed, the reception was never great in that truck.

 

The Antenna in the windshield also helps, not sure if the 1990's had that or not but my 93,94,95 all did. Probably some of the best radio reception I've ever had in a car.