With a bit drier weather today I've finally been able to road test my newly installed radio/cassette player - complete with electronic aerial. I didn't venture too far from home - perhaps 5 miles or so - but the results i.e. radio reception, are very encouraging. A little fade here and there but no extraneous noises that would require suppressors. My car is fitted with an
electronic fuel pump and the full Accuspark electronic ignition kit with carbon plug leads so this may be a positive contributory factor on that score.
Despite my rather derogatory reference to the 'Ray Smith' aerial earlier in this thread, I ended up buying one! Before doing so, I did message 2 separate eBay vendors of one each of the cheaper types (£4.95 and £3.99) to ask if they required a separate 12v feeds and what recommendations they had for location i.e. windscreen, rear window, parcel shelf etc. One vendor replied by copying and pasting exactly what was on the eBay listing and the other helpfully assured me in very pigeon English that ''can fit in truck booat (sic) and radio''. Ooooo Kaaaay!
I think it's safe to assume that such vendors are just importers and/or wholesalers and as such, have no detailed knowledge whatsoever of what they are selling.
I had an on-line 'chat' with Ray Smith, whose website is exclusively related to ICE and whilst he is of course aware of the much cheaper 'competition' he maintained that the quality of the materials used in his coaxial was far superior. Yes, I know he would say that wouldn't he? Yet I figured that any businessman wouldn't knowingly market a product 7 times more expensive that his competitors unless he thought it was so much better. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the 'cheapies' as I'm sure they work for a lot of people, in lots of cars, in lots of areas - I am just reporting my experience for members to consider if they too want to go down the electronic aerial route.
For the record (and against Ray Smith's recommendation) I mounted the aerial at the base of the rear screen and earthed it securely to the metal rear parcel shelf. I even manged to feed everything behind the narrow trim strip at the base of the window. There was a perfect amount of coax to feed down the side of the rear seat and along and under the carpet and up behind the parcel shelf. R S's suggestion was to mount it behind the mirror on the windscreen but as the earth strap is only about 8'' long, where are you supposed to secure it to? My radio/cassette was fitted in a plastic mounting pod under the n/side glovebox with pod-type speakers at each end of the parcel shelf.
I know there's currently a thread running about the possibility of an 'AUX' ignition setting but I don't feel confident enough to do that anyway so I simply took a permanent live feed from the fuse box and using one of those 'wrap over' cable-splitters (incidentally, 1 of 3 supplied with the aerial), I took a feed, via an on/off switch, to the aerial. I can now listen to my new toy without burning the coil out! I did it with a separate aerial switch because so long as I remember to switch the radio
and the aerial off when tucking her up for the night, there is nothing that can be drawing off the battery. It does make a massive difference, by the way, to the reception when the aerial is actually switched on. I don't seriously think though that a permanently live electronic aerial would be enough to flatten the battery...….but I didn't think that, last week, when accidentally overnight leaving the map-reading light on in my Jazz, would do that! Don't ask me how I know
Sorry to bang on at such length about a relatively trivial subject but if it helps someone in the future, which way to go, then it'll have been worthwhile.
