"mm" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 17 May 2007 08:43:01 -0400, PeterD wrote:
On Thu, 17 May 2007 08:09:03 GMT, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:
"mm" wrote in message
...
On 16 May 2007 18:20:51 -0700, wrote:
i was wondering if there was anyway possible to take a car stereo
system and inbed it into lets say a wall and hook it up to speakers
and everything but run it off of the electrical outlet in the house?
what would i need to rig up so that i could avoid the whole car
battery set up which would need a constant charging that would build
up hydrogen gas and pose as a potential fire hazzard? if any of that
made sense, i appreciate your help.
If you are doing this to get stations you can't get on your AC radios,
I"m told it won't work. I'm told car radios get such good reception
because of the car itself, maybe because it forms a ground plane
around the base of the antenna.
If that is true, how well do the radios in Saturns work? They have
all plastic bodies.
A 13.8v base station power supply such as you would use for powering a
mobile CB radio indoors, is all that's needed. You can also safely use a
12v
battery, by using a sealed gel-type, such as is found as the backup
supply
in alarm panels and emergency lighting. I'm not sure that the groundplane
argument holds up. On vehicles where the antenna is wing mounted, the
groundplane is very lop-sided. Also, vehicle antennas tend to be
electrically short for the frequencies concerned, and don't contain
anything
in the way of loading coils to address this, so end up being pretty
inefficient things.
Arfa
Realize that the antenna is a relatively tuned device, which makes it
more difficult to connect it ot a standard FM antenna. Other than that
possible problem (which may not affect your installation at all) then
Arfa's suggestion of a CB adapter is a good one.
I live in Baltimore and there have been both AM and FM stations in
WAshington which came in fine in my car, on two different radios of
the same style, and on my friend's car radio.
But badly if at all in the house. Over the years I've tried 10 or
more table radios and 2 stereo tuners, some pretty expensive. One AM
radio station WRC never came in at all in the house, and WAMU and WCSP
will come in somehwat on some radios and won't at all on others (and
price doesn't seem to matter. Some of the cheapest work the best)
I wanted to take one of the car radios and build a cabinet for it, to
hold it and the battery, and a small charger, but a friend who has
worked in electronics said it wouldn't work as well in the house. Do
you all think it would?
When I mend the things on the workshop bench, I just hang in any piece of
wire that comes to hand, and get perfectly good stereo results on FM, and
good reception on AM, so I don't see why you shouldn't get good results with
a decent antenna outside. At the end of the day, apart from the ones with
built in amps, as Dave pointed out, car antennas are just an electrically
short metal rod at worst, and a crude untuned helical wound on fibreglass at
best. Just one thing though. If you went for a genuine car antenna, and
needed to extend the cable over the length that it's supplied with, you need
to use a genuine ready made up extension for the job. Extending with any old
coax that comes to hand, for some reason, just doesn't work, as I found out
a few years back ...
Arfa