Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear, or maybe I misunderstood the layout. From his description, I was thinking that there was an external antenna in the "spade" that was wired back into the receiver. Maybe not.

Grounding the antenna was referring to it possibly being seperate such as a half or quarter wave antenna.

The carbon fibre I was talking about was to shield the wire inside of the metal locomotive to help reduce the RFI from the metal/metal contact, not any portion of the antenna that is on the outside of the model, again in relation to it possibly being a seperate antenna.

Its pretty hard to conjecture on what problems he's having without actually seeing the antenna setup I suppose.

And oops, never looked at the location, so yeah, I won't comment on frequencies anymore.