TOPIC:

which works best, a short lead from the receiver to a metal ariel or a long lead through a plastic tube?
just curious

Got to be the long lead & plastic tube ...

For a start, I've found metal aerials are a liability - they make crashes twice as bad / twice as long - you crash once ... then you crash again as the metal bends back & flips the car again

There have been a lot of interference issues reported with wrapping the reciever wire around metal aerials too - can't say I've experienced it though.

I'm sure there are some Tamiya manuals tht suggest cutting the reciever wire back, stripping it & connecting to a metal aerial, but this is a really bad idea - receiver aerials need to be a specific length (some multiple of the frequency & components in the receiver, so I'm not clear on what that should be) to work at their best.

"Effective height" of the receiver aerial is very important for range & intereference - the distance between the reciever at the bottom, and the very end of the wire.

For example, if you have a 30cm plastic tube, but your aerial wire is 45cm long, if you pull it all through & leave it dangling, you will have an "effective height" of 15cm or so, whereas if you don't pull any more wire through than is needed, and coil any excess between the receiver & bottom of the aerial tube, you would have an effective height of 30cm.

I doubt if the ratio between effective height and range is linear, but an effective height twice as high for a few seconds work has to be a good thing

I agree with Jon.
The best solution is to have the antenna in its full lenght in a plastic tube.

Tamiya actually advised to curl up and solder the receiver antenna wire to the metal antenna on the RM 3 and 4 (Tornado and Ford C-100), but as far as I know they never repeated that advice.... (see Tornado manual page 7 )

-Lars

Couldn't the curling up itself also cause interference?
I shortened the antenna on my Rx to prevent that from happening...

Btw - the (58154) Hummer uses a steel antenna in the kit.
It's not specified but from the manual it looks like they want you to shorten the wire and attach it to the antenna.
A car with a high center of gravity anyway...
Thought it would be a good idea not to do that myself.
Although it does look cool.

i was thinking of a single central antenna coming from the rear of my grasshopper, rather than one coming out from the side. i can see the downside of flip over damage, just want to make it a cleaner image....mmmmmmm may think on this one

How about use a 2.4GHz radio set? - the RX antenna lead might well be short enough to hide it inside the car, without fear of interference/range issues