Pontoon Boat & Deck Boat Forum

When I am on the water, my radio reception sucks! I've got a couple of 8gb flash drives we use most of the time, but flipping through them is a PITA. Has anyone installed some sort of high quality antenna out there to help reception? I've steamed radio stations over the internet thru a cell phone, but this also, is a pain.

FWIW: in reference to satellite radio...I consider radio to be similar to porn and refuse to pay for it .

If you look close at this pic, previous owner had removed antanae and used speaker wire from antanae base to rail...one GIANT FLOATING ANTANNAE..

Pandora is free, my wife plugs in here iPhone and we go toon'n. We can also use my blackberry or her iPad2 (with data plan) Our FM station are not very clear and turning it up gets even worse with crackles and pops..

If I had to go another route, I would use a cheap/old laptop from work with an external hard drive.. I have well over 200GB of MP3's from ripped CDs stored in my shop.

XM and Sirius can suck it, we had XM with our car and then paid for it the next 2 years, but the damned stations kept changing and there were still commercials. G'dammit if you are going to pay for it, no damned commercials!

-ron

I have about 6 GB of MP3's on a USB stick, and just put it on "shuffle".

I just don't do commercial radio that much.

curtiscapk wrote:If you look close at this pic, previous owner had removed antanae and used speaker wire from antanae base to rail...one GIANT FLOATING ANTANNAE..

Curtis, does it work well?

Our boat came with an electronic antenna that's under the helm and reception is great, It's powered by the power antenna lead of the radio.

I installed one of those Metra Universal Power Antennas (44-PW22) in the helm. It helped quite a bit.
Honestly though, the biggest boost we got in reception was when I upgraded the stereo itself. Some of these head units don't have good reception no matter what antenna you use.

The_Hellbilly wrote:

curtiscapk wrote:If you look close at this pic, previous owner had removed antanae and used speaker wire from antanae base to rail...one GIANT FLOATING ANTANNAE..

Curtis, does it work well?

no complaints Truman is in the middle of nowhere and very hilly, and expansive only had a couple of spots with no reception. WE have a sony marine radio I think.... will have to let you know after next weekend.

Mine is a cheezy looking wire inside the helm that came with the boat. It works fine here though, probably because Columbia is so near. I primarily listen to an mp3 player. It is a cheap sansa clip but I have 20 GB of music loaded on it (4 GB player and a 16 GB microsd card) and have it running rockbox. Rockbox is great for using playlists and creating them on the fly.

The_Hellbilly wrote:
FWIW: in reference to satellite radio...I consider radio to be similar to porn and refuse to pay for it .

At 99.00 per year I'll pay for the porn, don't boat in a tunnel so I always have a signal. Radio goes from the truck to the boat and turn it on, and the same stations no matter where we are. I like not having to listen to music all the time can listen to audio books, news, the races, and to keep the brother happy, the stock ticker.

On my travel trailer the reception sucked and I finally pulled the sound unit and discovered the antenna/cable neatly bundled up in a small package attached to the back. I unbundled it and spread the cable out in the rear of the cabinet and reception improved big time

Mr Geets wrote:... discovered the antenna/cable neatly bundled up in a small package...

Yep. I opened the hatch on my helm and discovered the same. Unrolled that and dramatically improved reception.

It is hard to beat the regular old 30" stainless steel vertical antenna for FM reception. Everything else is a compromise.

Personally I am an MP3 fan and I hate the radio. Unfortunately the best MP3 platform is still a PC running DOS and MPXPLAY. I have about a dozen commercial platforms in cars, phones and around the house but none of them allow "jukebox" play from a key pad.
I really don't understand that since a phone HAS a key pad.

MPXPLAY allows you to select a song by number at any time and defaults to random play if you don't select anything. That is what I have run in the car for most of this century and what runs the 3W1 Seeburg in my tiki bar.

We don't have music in the boat. The pleasing hum of a 4 stroke is music enough for me.

You should try Rockbox GregF! Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement that will run on various mp3 players including some ipods and sansa players. It allows you to create playlists on the fly and has a database you can go through song, artist, album and so on. You can be playing your music and insert an album or song next or insert it last or have it inserted randomly in you playlist. The cool thing is your music is playing while you are selecting/queuing up songs. I have around 1500 songs loaded on a tiny player that will run around 20 hours on a charge.

I hook up a Cobra power inverter to an extra marine battery (from Costco) . I then plug my itouch/ iphone into a docking station and rock out! I have a Klipsch Dock that kicks butt! At times I also transfer my XM radio from my house and plug it in on the boat. You just have to have good quality tunes in my humble opinion....