VHF/FM/AM Aerial Splitter

rotrax

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All our previous boats have had a Radio/CD player fitted when we purchased them. The current one does not, something I am attending to this season. I have purchased a suitable unit and speakers, sussed out the placement and wireing requirements but am unsure about an Aerial splitter. They seem to vary in price from 50 quid to 3 quid!

Advice, reccomendations, pro's, cons please?
 

bedouin

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Have you tried a simple indoor aerial inside the boat? Your VHF is an important piece of safety equipment and I would be wary about putting anything in the signal path if I didn't know exactly what was inside it.
 

rotrax

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Have you tried a simple indoor aerial inside the boat? Your VHF is an important piece of safety equipment and I would be wary about putting anything in the signal path if I didn't know exactly what was inside it.

No-as the OP says, It is yet to be fitted.

All my last 3 yachts have had a splitter, no problems with transmit/reception on VHF on those, over a 12 year period.
 

Rafiki

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All our previous boats have had a Radio/CD player fitted when we purchased them. The current one does not, something I am attending to this season. I have purchased a suitable unit and speakers, sussed out the placement and wireing requirements but am unsure about an Aerial splitter. They seem to vary in price from 50 quid to 3 quid!

Advice, reccomendations, pro's, cons please?

I hope you bought a DAB radio. If so then you will find that DAB aerials available to simply stick on the inside of a window, I think I paid about £12. Fairly unobtrusive, and provide a much better sound quality than an FM radio signal without the need for any splitters. I did this last year, fantastic radio quality, unfortunately forgot to check that it had a CD player!
 

Achosenman

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I use a Pacific Aerials splitter, so far without issue. It doesn’t seem to have affected the AIS transceiver as far as I can tell.
 

pandroid

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I find this question a bit odd. If you mean putting a splitter in the line of your Marine VHF to provide an aerial for a standard FM Radio, I wouldn't bother. If your boat is fibreglass the FM Radio will work fine on a bit of wire laid inside the hull. The Marine VHF Aerial is cut to a completely different frequency to FM anyway. (160Mhz vs 100).

We have an active MF/FM splitter with a masthead aerial, which is intended to be for Navtex, SW, AM and FM reception (not for Marine VHF), and the FM reception works better when the splitter is powered off. The manufacturer admitted to me that as a compromise this stuff really does not work, due to the widely different frequencies.
 

rotrax

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Are you being serious? DAB is rubbish anywhere out of a major city!

That is certainly my experience too!

The reason I am considering a non active AM/FM/VHF aerial splitter is that the VHF set and Radio/CD player will be near enough to each other for it to be a simple connection job, and that as our 3 previous boats used a AM/FM/VHF splitter without problems on either side, it seems a no brainer.

The real question, for real world users of these splitters is, does the price differential matter?

On ebay, they vary from £1.95 to £80.00!

I, like most who post here, do not wish to spent more than required for a reliable solution.

Thank you for the replies so far.
 

rogerthebodger

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That is certainly my experience too!

The reason I am considering a non active AM/FM/VHF aerial splitter is that the VHF set and Radio/CD player will be near enough to each other for it to be a simple connection job, and that as our 3 previous boats used a AM/FM/VHF splitter without problems on either side, it seems a no brainer.

The real question, for real world users of these splitters is, does the price differential matter?

On ebay, they vary from £1.95 to £80.00!

I, like most who post here, do not wish to spent more than required for a reliable solution.

Thank you for the replies so far.

I used one of these for my VHF FM radio but fitted it under the deck head on my steel boat and it works fine

I got mine from our equivalent to Halfords

https://www.ebay.com/itm/IMPROVED-U...515249?hash=item3d85f648b1:g:XF0AAOSwl7pci9fv
 

lw395

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That is certainly my experience too!

The reason I am considering a non active AM/FM/VHF aerial splitter is that the VHF set and Radio/CD player will be near enough to each other for it to be a simple connection job, and that as our 3 previous boats used a AM/FM/VHF splitter without problems on either side, it seems a no brainer.

The real question, for real world users of these splitters is, does the price differential matter?

On ebay, they vary from £1.95 to £80.00!

I, like most who post here, do not wish to spent more than required for a reliable solution.

Thank you for the replies so far.

There's some diplexers in our lab that would do the job very well, at much greater cost than 80 quid.
We found a splitter on the masthead aerial gave much better long range FM reception than a dipole in the cabin. I don't know who made the splitter, it was some ancient thing with the markings faded.
 

ghostlymoron

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When I bought my Mirage 28, it had a car radio fitted which worked well including LW for shipping forecast. After a few months ownership, I wondered where the aerial was. After a thorough search I found a stubby car aerial in the bottom of a storage locker. It doesn't take much!
 

Heckler

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All our previous boats have had a Radio/CD player fitted when we purchased them. The current one does not, something I am attending to this season. I have purchased a suitable unit and speakers, sussed out the placement and wireing requirements but am unsure about an Aerial splitter. They seem to vary in price from 50 quid to 3 quid!

Advice, reccomendations, pro's, cons please?
Ive got one spare on the boat here in Portugal, if you would like it for a small beer fund transaction I will bring it home.
 
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