I did install this Thuraya antenna in 2014 on a Dutch registered Piper and was able to get the EASA paperwork done as well.
Or just use the whole car holder, which is what I tried to do with the Hughes 7100, as per my writeup. I didn’t go far with that because it emitted a massive amount of RF interference.
Yes, get the car holder. The RF interference issue stems from the GPS repeater. I found that the Thuraya XT and the phone adapter don’t need it in a metal high wing Cessna so I just did not connect it which means the car adapter is not powered.
The connector is fairly obvious – it’s a spring loaded thing which just pushes against the bit in the back of the phone. If you bought the Thuraya car holder, you could extract the mechanism out of that and throw the rest away.
Or just use the whole car holder, which is what I tried to do with the Hughes 7100, as per my writeup. I didn’t go far with that because it emitted a massive amount of RF interference.
I got mine straight out of Antcom but I would hope that there are some US based resellers. A $1000 MOV is ridiculous.
A cable specialist has been puzzling over the connector for some time and now says it believes it can make a connector. If – and time will tell – this is successful I will post details here.
Meantime Antcom tells me there is minimum order size of $1,000 – are these antennas sold through other channels?
The antenna I originally installed (details higher up in this thread) worked fine with the old Hughes 7100 so should work with the XT.
How did you connect to the XT RF terminals?
I think I may have found a solution to connecting my Thuraya XT to an external Antcom antenna. Now I need to get one of these from Antcom, I’ve emailed them for suggestions of which antenna model.
Are there any updates from folks who have posted suggestions on this forum as to which model to use?
Hello
I want to buy antenna how can do?
There is always a potential issue with a GPS receiver being interfered with; harmonics or no harmonics.
Even well off the centre frequency, the GPS receiver will not have infinite out of band rejection.
However, I have used the Thuraya 7100 phone in the cockpit, even lying on top of the instrument panel (which is plastic on top) and never saw any interference with GPS.
That said, all my GPS antennae are on the top of the roof, which has a ground plane in it, so I would not expect something inside the cockpit to be interfering with GPS anyway. The RF stuff in the plane is wired with RG400, or better.
I think the satphone is best not left on all the time, just in case. I just use it for a minute, to grab tafs/metars for the destination and all likely alternates, say 1hr before ETA, and then disconnect the call.
With the GPRS mode, the call is always connected so perhaps there is more possibility of an issue, but one can still control the call activity. To dial out, you use *99# (the usual GPRS/3G dial-up) and to hang up you use ATH0 or something similar. One can still disconnect the call.
50Mhz is no problem as there are no harmonics.
I'm not worried about harmonics, more about VCO/Transmitter noise
