why older cars need long extendable antennas for radio reception, while modern cars often only have little stumps on the top but still good reception

Question

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In: Technology

Answer 1

Sorry for my English. I ll try to be as short as possibile since it’s in this subreddit. I think you are referring to fm am frequency, The answer is, it’s a compromise for aethetic and more import cause GPS satellite antenna need to be protected. So ideally the antenna must be the same of the wavelenght but since you can’t have 3 meter antenna even the 1/10 fraction can work. And now you also need antenna for GPS plus sometimes more satellite type. So we can do 2 things. We can use the back window of the car and hide a longer antenna around the borders that actually work better and stick the GPS in the little fin on top, or we can stick even the fm antenna inside the fin, bend it a lot and stick a rear inductant coil to try to gain more power, and be almost as good. In most case both solution are good enough. But again ideally even today, if you want to receive fm and am, best solution would be an antenna around 3 meters or ten foot on top of your car. Hope I was clear enough. Bye