wmartin@brl-smoke.ARPA (Will Martin ) (04/29/86)
Something I have long wondered about the small walkman-type radios that use the headphone cord as the antenna -- all of the small headphones I've seen use paired thin coax for the wiring to those 'phones. I would think that the use of coax as the antenna would be a mistake; that unshielded parallel wire would be better as an antenna, and that the 'phones, being driven with an output-level signal anyway, would not need shielded cable for their input. Do these use shielded coax-type wire for some reason I have not thought of? If not, do they use coax simply because thin, flexible, paired coax wire is available and cheaper than suitable four-wire parallel flat cable would be? I have thought about experimenting and replacing the coax on a set of 'phones with four-wire flat cable, but looking at a few catalogs indicates that I may have to strip four wires off the side of some wider ribbon cable to get such wire; any four-conductor unshielded I ran across had twisted wires, which probably would be little better than coax for antenna use. Before I try this, I was wondering if anyone else had done this, or had 'phones with unshielded wire and compared their effectiveness as antennas with the ordinary coax-wired varieties? Regards, Will Martin UUCP/USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA