TOPIC:

took my losi truck for a run tonight was going well until i hit a branch on the ground that has damaged my aerial wire badly nearly torn it clean off.

i have removed the esc/receiver board from inside the truck and have located the solder point for the damaged aerial. i was wondering what wire i needed to replace the damaged one or can i solder any wire i have spare on to replace it? does it need to be a specific type?

thanks in advance for any advice see the pics for the damage im gutted as its one of my favourite runners as its easy to transport

HI!... I do repairs like this all the time. Just find some copper (I prefer copper) wire that's the same gauge size and solder it on. Make sure it's roughly the same length as the stock wire was.

Hey nut, you need to use the same diameter wire as original and it needs to be exactly the same length as the original as this is directly linked to the frequency of the rx happy soldering, Andy......

Thanks im not sure on the length of the wire as i left half of it behind at the scene and the only wire i have thin enough as its very thin is the earth (black) wire from an old battery pack i have lying around im hoping this will work? ill try it tonight

tamiya wrote:

Thanks im not sure on the length of the wire as i left half of it behind at the scene and the only wire i have thin enough as its very thin is the earth (black) wire from an old battery pack i have lying around im hoping this will work? ill try it tonight

I have seen the number 24" bantered around

24" on a T-maxx receiver from solder to tip.. and 18" on e-maxx with the micro receiver from solder to tip.

As Andy said you shouldn't really use any old bit of wire ... I'd guess the correct stuff would be 7 strand, with each strand being 0.2mm (but don't take my word for it, count & measure) ... search for "7/0.2 equipment wire" on eBay/Maplin/RS

Rubbish...
All that's important is the LENGTH of the wire - anything that can conduct can act as an aerial as long as the length is the same or a length-factor of the wavelength you intend it to pick up.
RX aerial wire is small diameter copper only for convenience, ie it's small, light & easy to solder.
If we wanted to get "nitty-gritty" about it, solid wire behaves better as an aerial than stranded too

Use an old guitar string - it's "boingy" & hard to break, the nickel coating will allow you to solder to it. Cut the RX wire back to inside the car, make the guitar string + remaining RX lead the same length as the original RX lead

eddrick wrote:

Rubbish...
All that's important is the LENGTH of the wire - anything that can conduct can act as an aerial as long as the length is the same or a length-factor of the wavelength you intend it to pick up.
RX aerial wire is small diameter copper only for convenience, ie it's small, light & easy to solder.
If we wanted to get "nitty-gritty" about it, solid wire behaves better as an aerial than stranded too

Use an old guitar string - it's "boingy" & hard to break, the nickel coating will allow you to solder to it. Cut the RX wire back to inside the car, make the guitar string + remaining RX lead the same length as the original RX lead

I don't think your taking into accout resistance, which can have an affect on range. Everyone is entitled to a opinion though right or wrong, but it is theirs and therefore cannot be classed as rubbish

Resistance doesn't come into it, the wire is single ended, current isn't flowing.

The tuned part of the RX circuit is "looking" for an oscillation within the wire, of a particular frequency. Any size/length of wire will pick it up, but a "tuned" length boosts the power of a particular wavelength the circuit sees, through harmonic/in-phase wave addition.
The only aerial-related thing that can boost receiving ability of a receiving device is to make it full-wave length, double-wave length quadruple-wave length (etc) & in most cases this long/full length would be just too long to mount on the model. Most hobby radio stuff uses an aerial which is only a harmonic part-length of the full wave it's intended to pick up (Usually 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc) & the signal boosting, filtering & conditioning is done by the internal electronics.

Usually, to boost ability to receive a transmitted signal, you increase the transmitter's transmitting power, to "drown out" local noise. Increasing a receiver's ability to receive a transmission just causes problems with interference by weaker, unwanted transmissions, ie you'll be picking up rubbish from further away as well as the signal you intend it to receive.

Just found this www.csgnetwork....ncalc.html
without number-crunching, I'm guessing it's C=L.f (Wavespeed = wavelength x frequency) juggled to make wavelength the subject.

Plugging numbers into the calculator for 27MHz frequency gives a tuned aerial length of 10566.4mm, which means the bit of wire fixed to your average Acoms RX is probably a fraction of a full wavelength, & lets face it, you really don't want 10m of cable dragging behind your toy car....
1/2 (2583.2mm), 1/4 (2641.6mm), 1/8 (1320.8mm), 1/16 (660.4mm) 1/32 (330.2mm), 1/64 (165.1mm) etc should also work, but with reduced receptive power with each length-reduction stage.
Each reduction in length theoretically carries with it the need to be more accurate with the cutting, eg 1mm wrong at 1/64th wavelength will cow up the full wave tuned length by 64mm, & if the tuned length ain't right, you might just as well attach a saucepan (I would suspect the internal electronics are there to "clean up" the signal to allow for these discrepancies)