Tag: drilling

Posted on
by

After driving a few years now with a magnetic antenna foot and lingering about how good the antenna performance would be if I drilled a hole in de roof of the car, today was the day to do it. Henk PE1PEX helped me with the job. After 4 hours of the antenna mount was ready for testing and the whole car was put back together.

First test wasn’t disappointing at all. I could open repeater PI2RTD (about 65 km further) with only 5 watts from Henk’s driveway. We we’re very impressed with this result! Unfortunately I couldn’t test the antenna driving home from the job because Henk advised me to let the kit dry for at least one night. So as a good boy as I am I did.

To get a little impression the job from start to finish:

Posted on
by

The other day I did a complete rebuild-in of my Kenwood TM-D710 in my car (a 1999 Volvo V40 2.0T). Actually I had planned to get a cruise control kit from a junkyard-Volvo. But a late check of my wire tree learned me my car doesn’t have any preparations for a cruise control set. So I blew off that job.
Instead I picked up on another job: build in my Kenwood TM-D710! I did use the radio in the car before. But there where cables over the floor and the main unit was positioned in the spare tire. Not the ideal solution.
I did the whole job again. This time I pulled out the complete back-seat so I could lift the interior trim. This way I could run cables from the dash to the trunk. 2 networkcables for display unit and microphone, 1 speakercable and a dedicated 12 volt cable (fused)from the battery. I terminated the patch cables for display and microphone in the dash into a dummy switch. This way I can remove the display as well as the microphone so everything is out of sight.

Only remaining job is drilling a hole in my roof for a permanent antenna setup. More on that later.

Checkout the result: