Quote:
Originally Posted by kc0iv
Quote:
Originally Posted by jegzus
The problem is your antenna is only 3' long. If you want to be able to receive well and transmit well you need to get a 5' fiberglass antenna or a wilson 2000 trucker.
Also get yourself a SWR meter from radio shack along with a 3 foot jumper cable. Don't trust the SWR meter built into the radio I have never seen one be close to acurate.
The reason you hear the noises when you use the windows is because your power terminals are run to the fuse board in the truck along with everything else. To get rid of that you need to run the power wires right to the battery.
A well tuned cobra 29 will swing to 35 watts, and will receive very well. And a good peak and tune will cost 40-50 dollars, and stay away from truck stop CB shops they are sloppy and usually don't know what they are doing.
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Increasing an antenna's length from a 3' to 5' has very little improvement in the signal. It will give a little wider bandwidth. The biggest problem be it a 3' antenna or a 5' antenna the wavelength is still short compared to a 1/4 wavelength ( standard 102") antenna. Both antennas are heavily loaded electrically.
A coax cable should be a 1/2 wavelength (11 meters) to properly connect a VWSR meter. This will reflect the true reading between the antenna and the radio.
If you connect the wire to the battery you should have a fuse connected directly to the battery. A better approach would be to connect a .01mfd 50 volt capacitor directly across the motor terminals.
Since increasing the power from 4 watts to 35 watts amounts to a power gain of 9 db ( or about 1-2 "S" meter readings) I'm not sure you gain much for that 40-50 dollars.
kc0iv
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First of all there is a HUGE difference in a 3' and a 5' + antenna and you can never tell me different. The longer antenna's receive and transmit better due to the coil's and wire wrappings to make it equal a 102" antenna.
And yes if you want to be MR.Saftey then put a fuse at the battery along with the fuse at the radio......
And if 1-2 S units is not worth the money then that's fine, run your stock radio and don't cry when everyone is keying on you and you can't talk to any body on channel 19.
And if you want to get really technical the only true way to get an accurate SWR reading is use a bird meter and a 250mw slug to test your reflect that way.
I run 21' of Rg-213 coax in my big truck and my SWR using the bird meter is 1.3:1 on a wilson 2000.