xEM AC upgrade possibilities

Projects
21

Original question was about the Harley yes. I can make the garage work just figured if I could extend it it would look nicer being hidden in the attic with just the antenna coming down.

Here is my idea: blue circle is where the battery and fuse panel are, red circle is general area where I would like to put the antenna. On bikes most of the wires are ran down the frame under the gas tank, I was hoping I could do the same with this. But if it’s going to really hurt the performance of the antenna I can try to find another place to put it.

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22

I’d say it’s worth a try. Desolder the antenna wires from the board inside the xAC and splice on an extension, see if it still works

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23

Give it a go, I’ve done and seen worse done, just make sure to use coax or at the very least shilded wire.

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24

+1 on using good quality coax.

You might lose a bit of read range, but I’m guessing it’ll still work. The xAC has such insane range that I suspect you’ll still be fine

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25

I was curious, so i checked.

I just picked the smallest dia coax cable at digikey, in the shortest spool (25’), and it prices out as 61.89 plus shipping.

Check It Out.

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26

And they have to in stock :+1:

27

Had a close look at an xAC for other reasons. The cable is marked as “M17/119-RG174 50 OHM MIL C 17”.

Google found some pretty close (and cheap) matches. Google it.

The actual antenna is potted in place. You might could extend the existing co-ax, but I don’t think you’re gonna replace it entirely without a fight.

Just info for the future if you ever wanna try it.

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28

See now you got me wondering could we mount an SMA into the box, really short cable(non exitstant) on the antenna with SMA and then you could use off the shelf cables :thinking:

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29

Glad I got you thinking about that! I didn’t think anything remotely close to that… Pretty much the only thing I understood out of that was off the shelf lmao.

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30

I had to extend my antenna for my door lock and I only extend it about a foot but I just used a small gauge power cord. Everything works well and the read range is still good.

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