How much of a job is fitting a re-radiating ariel?

rowan_bridge · Occasional Visitor Joined: Dec 14, 2004 Posts: 6

From the conversations on the forum and from speaking to Tom Tom direct, it appears that I might need to fit a re-radiating ariel for Nav 3 with bt to work in a Peugeot 206. Is this a major job? I'm assuming that it probably needs a garage to do it for me? Or is it easy to fit them yourself?

DavidW · Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 5:46 pm Post subject:

You could either fit a re-radiating antenna, or simply buy and fit the appropriate external antenna for your GPS.

It's really just a case of sticking the antenna to your roof - most are magnetic - and routing the cable. The cable routing can take a fair amount of time if you want to hide it behind the trim, seals etc.

An external antenna finishes in a plug that goes into your Bluetooth GPS. A re-radiating antenna finishes in a plug that goes into the re-radiating unit - which is usually one powered by a cigarette lighter plug if you're fitting it in car.

An alternative is to mount the antenna in the 'put your toll tags etc. here' part of your windscreen - making sure that the antenna part faces outwards. That should work - but probably not as well as mounting the antenna externally to the car, not least as many of these antennas are designed with the assumption that they're mounted on something metallic which will act as a ground plane.

David

Yeoman · Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 10:41 am Post subject: Re-rad aerial

I switched cars to a Peugeot 807 with an athermoc screen some time ago and at the time was using a Navman 3000 sleeve that did not allow for an external antennae.
I purchased a re-rad aerial from Expansys and at first stuck it in the area near the rear view mirror mounting without the athermic layer. This was not ideal because the only effective way of mounting it was to tape it on which was both unsightly, and in hot weather the tape tended to come unstuck. The signal receiving part of the aerial is a fairly small magnetic block and so I then placed this at the very top of the bonnet from where it was very easy to run the thin cable around the back of the engine compartment and under the edges of the rubber trim that simply lift up into the car. The transmitting end consists of a small aerial rod on a velcro strip that conveniently would stick anywhere on the velour pillar trim. My iPAQ is mounted on the right corner of my windscreen and so the aerial sits right close to the unit when mounted. I am not sure what the effective range of the aerial is but in my configuration this works extremely effectively, indeed better than in my previous car where I had no athermic screen and relied on the sleeve picking up the signals.
All in all in took me about 10-15 minutes to fit the aerial myself.

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