XM antenna location

[Whiskeydan]

I hate to put it on the body. A friend has one on the dash tucked up close to the windshield of his truck.
I wonder what kind of signal I'll get here with it on the dash of the W126.

[TX76513]

Dan do you have the small antenna about the size of a quarter?

[Whiskeydan]

I believe so. Its whatever comes with the Pioneer GEX-P920XM receiver.

I guess it's going to be receiver dependant also. Not sure if some have better receivers or not. Looking at the size of the cable I would suspect they downconvert in the antenna. That long small coax cable has to be very lossy at the sat downlink frequency.

[TX76513]

I have mine dead center of roof in front of sunroof - heck I'll just show you on Saturday

[Whiskeydan]

XM receiver seems to have plenty of signal with the ant tucked under the windshield. Been listening to it for a couple of days now.

[Botnst]

Until I bought my present Pioneer Premier P490, I used a Roady through the Becker cassette for XM (1995 E320--w124). It worked great until the Becker's volume control became increasingly unpredictable. I tried the Roady's antenna all over the dash and found that the most reliable signal reception was just to the between the windshield and just to the left of the passenger-side, dash speaker.

I drove around with the antenna in one position at a time until I found that as the best position. I have no idea why that would be different from amidships or on the port side, but it was.

Somebody had uploaded photos and a description of how to run the XM antenna under the dash and up through the speaker grill on the passenger side. I never did that (too lazy) but it looked like a pretty easy way to conceal the wiring. Could it have been Bruce Hat who uploaded it?

With my new system I ran the antenna back to the trunk. It's center-mounted and gets great reception. Oh yeah, the Premier sounds a heck of a lot better than the Becker driving the stock speakers, and I liked the Becker sound.