How do earphones work as an antenna

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All rights reserved. Please, try the fish. Like what you're reading? About Archives Sponsor Us. By Ernie Smith Jan 23, For All Sony Xperia Users, you must cut the headphones that came along with your phone.

Otherwise, it won't work. This is my first inscrutable, so forgive me if something is not up to the mark. Hope You Liked It!!! I don't know where to start. I have to point out though that I will try to be as informative as possible in my comments. First off, a vast majority if not all mobile phone audio outputs are powered by chip CMOS type amplifiers that operate with an output impedance of ohms.

If you short left and right connections red and white wires to ground bare wire you are putting the output impedance to 0ohms and therefore making current infinity amperes thus frying the chip. I can tell you with absolute certainty that when you put your phone to max volume, plug that antenna with wires twisted, shorted and touching the metal part you will damage the amplifier IC. Try removing the antenna and plug a normal headphone in and you will notice a significant drop in the max volume or no sound at all!

Second, your mobile phone, whatever model it is, will detect types of connection depending on the impedance it is sensing on your headphone jack. This is done via sensing the fourth wire forgot the color, might be green or yellow whether there is impedance or if it is simply grounded.

Shorting the mic 4th wire wire to the ground will not damage the preamp circuit as this is similar to a silent mic. Third, this project works to bypass the fm radio requirement as a shorted connection from audio left and right to ground white and red to bare where the mobile phone senses the "headphones" simply because impedance dipped below 32ohms which is actually 0ohms since it is shorted to ground. Since phones by default will run audio to headphones that are grounded by the antenna and fry the chip before you can set it to play via loudspeaker.

Even without the telescopic antenna it will pick up radio waves and your radio app will work although reception won't be that good. You can put the whole assembly inside the telescope if you want to boost signal but make sure the white and red connections of the resistor is insulated and does not touch the insides of the metal.

Put your phone on the lowest audible volume setting before you plug it in so you don't run the risk of overheating the resistors.

Please note that this is in theory and you do this at your own risk! Unfortunately although the headphone wires are a good length, very close to a quarter wave in fact, the other half of the antenna is the phone body, which is still quite small.

This can be improved a lot with the USB cable, which doesn't need to be plugged into anything else, or by the capacitive coupling to the large metal object. I don't have one of that style of receiver headphone cord as antenna to test with, but here's what comes to mind as easy to do:.

Plug in your headphones and the extra wire into the two jacks of the splitter, and the splitter into the radio. The extra wire should have some effect on the reception. Rearrange it, hang it up high in the air vertically , and so on until you get reception you find adequate for all stations.

Remember that your body also has an effect, so try to hang it up somehow and step away before evaluating the result. You can change the effective length of the wire without cutting it by tightly coiling the free end. Once you have a result you like, tie down the wire so it'll stay where you put it and you're done. The positioning of the headphone cord will still have an effect on reception, but hopefully it will be lesser, and may be more like missing just one of the five stations.

What we're doing here is creating a second antenna. By moving it away from your body, it should function better, hopefully picking up all five stations strongly enough for your receiver.

Of course, for the best results we would want a carefully designed antenna, but we'd need to know the characteristics of the receiver input and possibly build a matching network for it, and I figure that's more trouble than you're looking for.

After all, the most straightforward way to get better reception is to get a radio with a proper antenna or antenna jack. I always try to get a headphone or earbuds that have long cables. The longer the cable, the better the reception. It also helps to stretch the cable as much as you can if the cables are sort of bunched up. Also, for me on my MP3 player, reception is best once the screen turns off. For the unique areas, there's really not much you can do. I'd try to get to the highest ground possible and test my luck there.