Hi pilots,

To tacle the disadvantage of directional antenna's on a moving pair of Fatshark goggles, and use the comfort of my car in hostile areas, I want to mount antenna's on the roof of my car.
Because the kind- and length of the extension cable seem to have a great influence on the recepsion I wander if anyone has experience on this toppic to share.

My idea is to have the crossfire-antenna (TBS offers the kit to replace the fixed antenna with a SMA connector) and two antenna's (one helical and one omni) for the rapidfire receiver on my Fatshark goggles. How much recepsion will I lose if I use 1 meter (+/- 3Ft) coax extention-cable between the antenna's and the rapidfire module?

Hope some enthousiasts have experience with this or are interested in this idea and join me in this quest.

There's hardly any info I can find about it...

There's a guy on JB's discord channel who used some professional lab grade RF equipment to test extension cables leading to antennas on the outside of a vehicle, and the conclusion was that the gain losses you get from the extension cables meant that it was better to just sit inside the vehicle with the antennas directly attached to your equipment. He tested a number of different quality extension cables but they all gave disappointing gain losses as far as I can remember.

That is the only information I have about such a setup.

If you want to try it, it would be best to get the highest quality (which usually also means most expensive) cables you can find and then see if the results you get are acceptable.

Hi JazzyLoops,

Another option may be a "ground station" setup.

Even though I looked into this at one point, I still don't quite have
a grasp on all of the details. If the system is compact enough, you
might be able to set it up outside the car, then get inside car to fly.
Yeah, it probably isn't cheap, but might be a consideration (or not).

Agree on the ground station idea.

For video feed, one way doing this is by putting the analog VRX on a FuriousFPV Dock King Ground Station mounted externally on the roof of the car or on a tripod and running the AV cable into the goggles. Similar stuff can be done with a HDZero module mounted on a tripod and running the hdmi cable into to goggles.

For Crossfire link, I guess you can just run that from inside the car if flying around yourself within a few hundred meters.

I’ve got a semi-similar situation where I sit under my carport to protect myself from the weather, but that means my house, shop, and carport roof are messing with my signal.

Would it be possible to build a repeater? Ie: vtx transmitting on r1, dock king receiving on R1, output of dock king going to a low power vtx transmitting on r8, goggle vrx receiving on r8?

Seems like it could be an ideal solution for the original poster any myself, but I don’t know if it would cause latency or some other issue I’m overlooking.

A repeater type setup can work too especially if you fly alone and have the flexibility to space the channels wide enough.

You will also take into account additional vtx+vrx+antenna costs.

This would be great for someone that wants a wireless setup.

  I was going to use a ufl extension but I don’t think there’s any way to get ufl connectors back apart if one isn’t hard mounted,plus the solder joint can create noise.