which antenna

"Ted" <NOSPAM-miamited@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:drqAb.3464$nH.262@bignews6.bellsouth.net...
> I won a nokia car kit to use with my 6340i on eBay and need to get an
> antenna for it. I know that I need a dual band. Would a triple band hurt
the
> kit, phone or reception? Is there a difference in the brand, and if so
which
> should I look for and which should I stay away from?

Unless you're planning on driving around America in your car with the car
kit installed you won't need triple band. Also, a dual band aerial will work
reasonably well with all three bands as two of the bands are pretty close in
frequency.

There are various types of aerial available. You should first decide if you
want to drill a hole through your car roof. The highest gain is achieved
with the shortest length of directly connected high quality co-axial cable
connected to a good aerial such as a half wave whip. At most this would be
about 17cm long, depending on the aerial design if it's dual band it might
be 26cm at most. However, longer doesn't always mean better.

If you don't want to drill a hole then you can use a through glass aerial.
These have a coupler that sends the signal through the glass of your
windscreen to a coupler on the other side, and vice versa. Of course this is
not quite as good as a direct connection. The antenna whip on the outside
can be the same as stated above.

If you don't want anything on the outside of your car you can use an
internal aerial which sticks somewhere on the inside of the car. Or even one
of those "tax disc holder aerials". However, these are all extremely poor in
performance compared to either of the above.

You can get a variety of whip designs. Some try to save space by coiling the
aerial so you can get aerials from a few cm in length the lengths stated
above. Compressing the aerial like this does affect performance slightly.

Adam