frsky dipole antenna mod and range test

knowmercy

Junior Member
I've seen various threads on the internet about modding 2.4Ghz receivers to get better range. There have also been very scientific findings posted as to what is and isn't happening. Today I set out to see if I could improve the range on my equipment. Here's what I have done.

I have been flying a stock Futaba 10J radio (which I absolutely love) with an frsky, delta-8 receiver. This has worked very well for me and I'm quite happy with how they are performing together. I have another quad copter that is equipped with the stock futaba 3008 reciever. As my baseline, I did a range test on the futaba receiver. During this test, I am running a 1.3ghz fpv transmitter. That's not really fair because that will drop the range a bit. I was able to go about 30 paces from the transmitter before I lost signal. This is perfectly acceptable especially with the fpv transmitter saturating the poor receiver during the test.

Then I took the frsky receiver and modded both antennas to be 1/2 wavelength, dipole's. I used cat5 cable and trimmed both sides of the antenna to 28.35mm. This matches what is on the stock futaba radio. It is entirely possible (though unlikely), that just tuning the frsky antenna slightly may have improved the range. When I range tested the dipole antennas on my frsky, the range was more than double and I still had signal. The futaba manual says anything from 30-50 paces is acceptable, and in this case I was at 60 and still hadn't seen any sign of signal loss. My tests are not scientific by any means, but someone else may find it useful. Good luck! Cheers.

This first video summarizes the modification to the stock antenna.

This second video shows the range test and my pleasant results.
 

knowmercy

Junior Member
Go for it!

Excellent! This is a very straightforward and simple modification. My only piece of advice would be to get a couple extra antenna wires in case things don't go well.

I'm curious to know how it works for you. What kind of receiver are you going to be doing this on? This only takes me about 5 minutes to do both antennas now. I'm considering trying it on my futaba receiver now as well. Cheers!