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com antenna

Not advisable as comm signals are vertically polarized and anything you put in a wing would be horizontal.
Signal strength would be very poor.
 
Mel said:
Not advisable as comm signals are vertically polarized and anything you put in a wing would be horizontal.
Signal strength would be very poor.
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I might quibble with the words "very poor".
I built an Archer-clone, bent the high current part downward (top to bottom) as much as possible. I have a -10 so there is more vertical room to do this than in other RV's (except maybe the -14?). I'd say the effective range is about 60 - 70% that of my external belly whip. I'd call it "fair". For my flying, for a #2 com, it's good enough.
 
Another problem with the com ant in the wingtip is directional coverage.

If you have it in your port wingtip, you will get little coverage toward the 3 o'clock position.
 
And another problem is the VSWR is going to be very high on an low efficiency antenna, on a receive only radio the result of that is weak signal, with a transmitter the result is an overload of the transmitter output transistors whiich may result in failure.
 
We put one on the RV-10 and had to

take it out of the loop and install a belly mount. The wing-tip install was very poor ---- the VOR antenna was just "OK'.
 
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