Fleetnet Antenna Question

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als_medic

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Jan 14, 2005
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OK, this might seem an odd question, but here goes.
I'm looking at a project of fixing up a surplus Canadian Forces Iltis, a small 4x4 jeep type vehicle. They all have a fitting for a long whip antenna, which I believe is the smae as avaialable here.... >http://www.armyradio.com/arsc/customer/product.php?productid=1639&cat=71&page=1<
The base unit, already attached to the vehicle, has a tuning mechanism on the bottom. >http://www.armyradio.com/arsc/customer/product.php?productid=1637< but it only covers regular military frequencies.
So my question is, to use this antenna for fleetnet, could I set it to the 70.5-78MHz setting and instead of it being say a 1/2 wave antenna for those frequencies, it would be a 1/4 wave antenna for the 140-156MHZ range?
Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. I'm just looking ot keep the vehicle looking authentic and would love to use the long military whip antenna on it.
 

phyberoptics

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May 12, 2003
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Orangeville, Ontario
The thing is, the tuner is going to switch inductors (coils) and capacitance into the antenna circuit to trick the radio into thinking the antenna is as close to a 1:1 SWR that it can get. If the tuner specs are for the 70mhz band, you can't trick it to do vhf without changing the guts of the tuner.

So basically, no, what you are looking to do will not work. If fleetnet is the only thing you are going to listen to on this antenna, you'd be better off bypassing the tuner. Because you are only receiving, the length of the antenna won't really make too much of a difference. If you put a 102 inch antenna with no tuner right to the radio, you're going to have some good results.

I use my scanner for 800mhz trunking and fleetnet, and I use a 800mhz coil antenna, and can receive fleetnet without any issue, full scale.

Antenna tuners are for transmitting only, to give the transmitter a false sense of security ;-)

Hope that helps and good luck with the project.
 
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