I thought I would take a couple of minutes to summarize the various things I've done to improve the range on my 27MHz Porsche. This should provide one place for people to find a whole list of things that will help the range. Hopefully, those of you who are disturbed about the short range can find some things to help below.
I've listed the mods in the order I did them. Keep in mind that I had a couple of criteria: they had to be simple (I know very little about electronics) and they had to be cheap.
So, here's what I did and how it helped. All range measurements were made inside my house, and I validated them by trying the same things in my office (where there are lots of computers).
As a baseline--out of the box, I got about 7' of range before the car stopped. Steering got spotty at 5'.
1) Untie the knot in the antenna. This is the small knot under the PCB. Be careful of the fragile steering wires! Cost: nothing. Time: 2 minutes. Difficulty: Trivial. Range went to 10', steering got spotty at 7'.
2) Replace the antenna in the controller. For everyone who is scared to do this--DON'T BE! It's really easy. I told how in the previous post. Cost: $5. Time: 15-20 mins. Difficulty: Easy. Range went to 35'-40' with good batteries, steering got spotty about 7' before the end of the range.
3) Add a longer antenna wire to the car. I was scared to desolder the one on my PCB, so I just cut the existing antenna off inside the car at about the point where it takes a turn to come out of the car. Stripped the insulation off about 1/2" of it. Then I took about 8" of 20ga single strand wire, stripped the insulation off it, and spliced the two wires together. Because it unbalanced my car to one side (making it tip on turns), I bent it over in an upside-down narrow U shape. Cost: nothing (I had the wire). Time: 5 mins. Difficulty: Easy. Range went to 45'-50', steering got spotty in the last 5'.
4) Add an AC/DC adapter to your controller. I followed the instructions in the sticky in this forum and didn't really have too much trouble with it. I got a switchable voltage 800ma adapter, because I eventually want to do a dual battery mod, so I wanted to be able to charge at 4.5V. I also wanted to see if 4.5V in the controller increased the range (over the 3V 2AAA batteries put out). Cost: $20. Time: 1 hour (because I'm a duffer and clumsy with an iron, but also because I was just having fun soldering
). Difficulty: Medium to hard for me, easy if you're modestly handy with an iron. Range went to who knows how long...I can't get a long enough run indoors to tell the max (50' is my longest run, and steering was still very crisp when I hit the wall). I think a lot of that is from the increased current I'm getting...I think the adapter probably puts out more current than fully-charged batteries. When I tested the range in a room and a hallway with lots of metal and lots of computers, I found that the adapter added about 10% to the range when run at 4.5V vs 3V. So, my guess, based on the car's performance, is that I'd probably get in the 60'-65' range indoors at 4.5V.
So, that's my experience. I've really enjoyed tweaking this thing...I hope this helps someone else enjoy it as much as I did.
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