Powered DAB aerial

[Ch00]

OMO I have a car DAB radio on the bike and comes with its own aerial which works but any hint of tree cover and the signal drops outs. I am wondering if a powered aerial would help or should i get a better none powered type.

I can get DAB around most of the country in the car and had hoped the bike would be same.

Anyone got any recommendations?

[embee]

A knowledgeable person will doubtless be along soon, but from my efforts to get a monopole (i.e. telescopic car item) radio aerial to work on a bike, I concluded that the big problem is the lack of a ground plane. A car body acts as a ground plane which effectively turns a monopole aerial into a dipole by reflecting the waves, a bike doesn't have this large area of conductor so I concluded you'll never get a car aerial to work very successfully on a bike. I'm not sure what the best solution is though, need an expert.


I did wonder about trying to incorporate a dipole aerial into a bike, it does need to be the right length though, I pondered running a dipole along the length of the bike under the bodywork, the lengths could be nearly right, around 1m for a simple half wave dipole for usual 88-108MHz FM radio. Never got round to trying it though.


I understand DAB frequencies are in the 175-240MHz range, more or less double the equivalent FM frequencies so typically half the wavelengths, so a DAB aerial could be basically about half the lengths (or use similar lengths for a better signal strength).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-FM-Antenna
http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/broadcast/dab/dab_frequencies.php




Experts please.

[Ch00]

Interesting thoughts. There must be a way!

[Ch00]

My unit a Sonichi S1000-DAB is 2nd hand.

I have just removed some black tape from the aerial lead. Looks like its been mashed and then soldered back together. As you can see from the picture.

http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd86/Ch00ie/Mobile%20Uploads/20150920_130021_RichtoneHDR.jpg (http://s227.photobucket.com/user/Ch00ie/media/Mobile%20Uploads/20150920_130021_RichtoneHDR.jpg.html)

Would a new version of the same aerial make any improvement over once that has been fixed?

[Corny Gizmo]

I would cut all that crap out and re-do the connections properly and weather-proof it. It cant hurt to try