On Mar 3, 5:23 am, "Gary Smith" wrote:
Hi, i am a new ham and i just purchased an old VP commodore station wagon. I
was wondering what the best method would be mounting antennas on this
vehicle. It has a non metallic roof rack so i was thinking of getting a
metal plate across the roof rack and mounting the antennas on that. So i was
thinking:

1. How to electrically connect the plate to the vehicle
2. What order/sizes to have the antennas in. (Largest at back, smallest at
front? It shouldn't really matter, depending on directionality
requirements.)
3. The best method of routing the coax from inside car to roof plate, i
don't want to cut holes in the roof if not needed but probably will have to.


I did something like this for my VW Passat. The way I wound up
connecting it was two fold. First, the ends of the rack rails had a
plastic cover over where the bolts holding the rack onto the car body
were. Popped the cover off, removed the nut, put wire with lug under
the nut. Cut small notch in edge of beauty cover to run wire through
and popped it back on.

As far as coax went, I just ran through the rear hatch gasket. Cut a
small slit in the gasket, and carve out a hole big enough for the
coax, install coax, then use gasket glue (or superglue) to repair the
slit.
use small coax, at least for the gasket traversing part. RG-174 is
pretty small (2mm?) and a 10-15cm doesn't have all that much loss.

A friend went to quite a bit more trouble and went through the
existing radio antenna hole. he built a little "collar" that matched
the base of the antenna. There's a fairly large hole through the body
there, but to route the wires you have to pull the headliner off.



BTW, A good body shop or car stereo installation place can remove and
replace interior trim quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. They have
all the right weird shaped tools and the judgement about just how much
you can pry or pull without breaking things.

Especially if you have Sirius or XM radio in VK land, there's probably
folks around who have gotten pretty good at inconspicuously routing
coax from outside the car to inside.