The antenna on my truck is one of those silkscreened windshield kind. Looks kind of like a defroster line. I've had poor reception since it was new. It pulls in a lot of stations, but the quality seems poor. FM stations sound staticky.

Inspecting the antenna, I found a v shaped nick that cuts through about half of the trace on the windsheild. I can almost convince my self that I also see a crack across the remainder. (wishfull thinking maybe)

So, Just how much damage can one of these antennas sustain before causing problems? Is the nick, by itself enough? Would a microscopic, essentially not visible to the eye, be enough? An Ohmmeter should tell me if there is an out and out break. But could it give a false sense of conductance, while there remains a problem producing poor reception?

Do you have an adapter for the antenna? I believe that all of those defroster-style antennas are the "dual-diversity" type, which require some sort of adapter that does more than just make the connectors right.

Sorry, I may not have made it clear, I'm not currently using this antenna with an empeg tuner. That is a future step. Adaptors arn't the problem.

I was trying to tap into the empeg gestalt mind, hoping to find out if the damage I've noticed is relevant to the problem.

I have no idea if it's causing the problem or not, but one thing you can try is the rear window defroster repair kits. I believe they come with some kind of pen with conductive "ink" that might be enough. Unforunatly I'm not to sure how you'd undo something like that if it proved to not be the problem or caused more problems. Perhaps try bridging the gap with tinfoil or something else conductive and see if your reception improves?

Matthew

I did try using an ohmmeter. The trace regesters about 2.1 ohms across the full length of ~22 inches. Or 0.1 ohms/inch. Measured at points along the trace gives expected linear progression. The nick dosen't seem to make a difference.

It's with the factory head unit. I hadn't considered it but it may be the head unit itself is just noisy.