Car radio antenna booster diy how to#
Car radio antenna booster diy manual#
Car radio antenna booster diy portable#
Car radio antenna booster diy Bluetooth#

Car radio antenna booster diy portable#

The second step is to strip off the insulation of the two wires from one end and tie the two uninsulated corners of wires together. The antenna instantly and dramatically boosts the AM reception of any portable radio, home stereo receiver or table top radio, by simply placing the antenna near your radio and tuning it, or, with this model, allows you to hard-wire the antenna to your home stereo receiver or table top radio with twin lead attachment.

Then we need to cut the wire and divide it into two pieces of equal length. And since a lot of these antennas are outside your normal field of vision, you may not even notice that the motor is broken unless you specifically go looking for it. The first step is to take the ribbon wire in the length of few inches longer than required. It’s especially common for car wash attendants to push these in to keep them from breaking off in the wash, and if someone doesn’t remember to pull it back out on the other side, it’s pretty easy to just drive away none the wiser.Įlectric antennas that extend when the radio is turned on can also fail in the down position, in which case your radio reception will probably be pretty bad. Since there isn’t any mechanism to prevent these masts from being retracted, anyone can walk by and shove your antenna down.

Car radio antenna booster diy manual#

This may sound like extremely basic stuff, but it’s actually surprisingly common for manual antennas to be retracted and then left that way. Pulling it back out, if you find it shoved in, may be all it takes to vastly improve your reception.

Car radio antenna booster diy how to#

Since antennas function by picking up radio waves, it only stands to reason that being shoved down inside the car might make it difficult for your antenna to function correctly. How to Make A TV Antenna Amplifier Draw a large circle on thick cardboard, then create semi-circular projections on either side of that cardboard. Whatever the case, if you have a retractable mast and your reception has been awful lately it's definitely worth checking this first. Connect the two so they receive power from the same circuit, plug the dongle's output into the modulator's input, and the whole mess can be hidden under the dash and out of sight.There are a lot of ways that a manual antenna mast can end up pushed in, like if a car wash attendant forgot to pull it back out, or maybe a large bird decided to perch on it.

Car radio antenna booster diy Bluetooth#

It boots up when it gets power, searches for paired Bluetooth devices, and feeds the resulting audio into RCA cables. That's where the MIL-BTREC marine Bluetooth dongle comes in it has no controls of any sort, and thus no maddening little buttons to push. This device is made with a couple of female RCA jacks, but only suckas run an audio cable from the phone to the modulator. This device goes between the car's antenna and its radio and feeds a signal to a designated frequency when it's powered up I have found that the $20.35 Scosche FM-MOD01 unit gets the job done just fine. What you want, if you need to feed a quality audio signal to a car FM radio that lacks an AUX jack (i.e., just about every factory radio made before the late 2000s), is a wired FM modulator. Wireless FM modulators suck, and we will speak of them no more here. The MIL-BTREC Bluetooth dongle has no controls it powers up and seeks connections as soon as it gets 12 volts DC. Screwing up this stuff can result in sadness, misery, injury, death, or worse. Warning: Do not attempt any part of this project unless you already know how to work with automotive wiring, read a wiring diagram, and use tools in a safe manner. Here's how I solved the problem cheaply and without doing any modifications more serious than splicing a few wires. Even my hooptie 1992 Civic has Bluetooth connectivity for its junkyard audio system… but I didn't want to violate the numbers-matching originality of my Lexus, not by swapping out the radio and certainly not by drilling holes in the dash. While cassettes were fine in their day, I prefer to play digital-format music files from the 100 gigabytes of MP3s on my smartphone. It's an amazing car, nearly 20 years old and completely problem-free, but there was one problem: the factory audio system sounded great but played only cassettes and CDs. After years of searching for a pre-1998-facelift Lexus LS400 in nice original condition, I found this 1997 Coach Edition in Silver Jade Metallic and snapped it up. For those interested in cheaper toys, Philips Auto Audio makes a portable player, the CD 10, that slides in and out of a simple tray/pre-amplifier hooked up.