Vayu Restoration

I am finally making progress with the antennas. With the FM antenna I found one of the biggest problems was with a splice in the coax I forgot about. Once I re-did that the reception got better, but not great. I tried using an old marine VHF FM antenna but that was still not perfect and had some fuzz in the signal. I decided to build a new FM antenna out of wire and PVC tube. I used the old loop type antenna design laid out on a horizontal. This type of antenna is called a 5/8 wave "folded dipole" or "T" shaped antenna.
The information I got off the web is as follows:
“The formula for a 5/8 wave antenna using typical 300 ohm "twin lead" is L = 300/f x 5/8 x 1/2; where "L" is the length in meters of the antenna and "f" is the frequency in Mhz of the station to be tuned. This can be simplified to L = 93.75/f. An antenna built for 98 Mhz would be: 0.9566 meters or 95.66 cm (centimeters) long. For those more familiar with Imperial units than metric, the formula to convert centimeters to inches is: cm X 0.3937. This means 95.66cm X 0.3937 = 37.66 inches long.” From http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Fm-Antenna
I wanted my antenna tuned to 106.7 so I ended up with a length of 34.6”. This did not seem too big to go back on the arch so I went with it. To add structure to the basic wire thing I used PVC tube. For less than $10 I was able to put it together out of ¾” and 1” tube. The arms being ¾” and the support being 1”. The tee in the middle was a ¾ x 1 tee. The tricky part was the base. I used a 1 x 3 adaptor and cut the socket off the 3” side turned it upside down and simply bolted it to the arch. Maybe not the prettiest thing but not too bad and it works. I used some small scrape wire to go in the tube and a 300 to 75 ohm adapter to connect to a 75 ohm wire to the radio. I sliced the wire with a radio antenna plug with 75 ohm connectors which were not an exact fit but close enough. I now have crystal clear tunes again! No more fading in and out.
That took care of the FM but I had to do something with the wifi still giving me trouble. The company that I got the antenna sent me a replacement transmitter so I set about installing the antenna properly. The antenna they sent me was a 15 db antenna the most powerful one they had. They also sent an ultra low loss coax cable to go with it. Problems were the antenna had no mount suitable for a boat. They sent a steel clamp to bolt to another tube. This was basically useless for a boat. So I got an old 1-1/2” antenna from a friend who does marine electronics. I cut this off just above the base and used a short piece of 1-1/2” PVC tube to couple the 2 together. I split the PVC at the ends and used hose clamps to clamp everything together. I also used stretch wrap rigging tape to seal things up and make it all look better. They I had to run this big coax through the arch and on to the nav station. Not an easy task but once done makes a nice installation and puts the transmitter in the nav station out of any corrosion areas and close to the computer. So far it is working well we will see if it lasts. I have yet to have any wifi system work long than a year. Most have failed do to water intrusion so maybe this setup will work, if the transmitter will not fail. If it does fail I will try something completely different lol.