Brief Description: Satellite Antenna Mounting - Part 1
I've been pondering how and where to mount the 5 (yeah, five) satellite antennas for the two GPS navigation receivers, XM Weather, XM Radio, and DNX-8120 GPS navigation. That's a lot of antennas and I really didn't want to run the coaxes all the way down the side of the fuselage so that I could mount them somewhere on the rear of the airplane. I'd been thinking of making a simple "tray" to mount them on the engine-side of the firewall up at the top near the cowling. The fiberglass cowling is thin and wouldn't pose any RF issues. Heat from the engine might be an issue, but I plan to add a small blast tube from the engine baffling into the little tray to keep air circulating which should be fine.
The best part is that the cable runs were very convenient and only about 3' feet long. I reterminated the XM weather antenna with a new SMA connection (Part number CONSMA007-R178 from Digikey, btw), and made a clean splice in the GPS antenna for the DNX-8120. I ordered two GPS antennas Gilsson with 3' cables to replace the stock ones for the GRT HX units that had about 14' cables.
The top of the tray will be sealed with the baffle rubber and screwed to the top of the cowling with four flush head #8 screws in addition to the riveting to the firewall.
