upgrade attennas

Back in the 60s and 70s there were not any Francis Antennas, I believe they were from Radio Shack back then.

 

I settled in on Predator 10K for both barefoot and amped setup (skip shooting)..

Not saying they are the best, but for what I'm doing they have performed well..

 

You could buy everything from RS back then. I used 102" SS whip. Never did run a fiberglass whip.

 

in order to achieve maximum performance we must be willing to try different radio technicians along with different antennas and perform multiple experiments.
until you have had a Radio tuned by Hard Drive at Fine Tune CB shop and learned the importance of phase angle and how it relates to impedance there are many things you are missing out on.

 

At the risk of figuratively waving my own flag once in awhile, and since I don't make any $$$ money on this, may I suggest taking a look at a link to a solution I offered awhile ago on how to make a vertical dipole for almost $0, and the theory of why it works.

Here's the link:

http://www.thetruckersreport.com/tr...n-fiberglass-cabs.html?highlight=DIY+solution

It won't work for *everybody*; individual differences in vehicle construction and the fact that shielding will still remain in some directions for some users may hinder the effectiveness of the array. But for anyone with a "plastic cab" who isn't able to get adequate counterpoise area (so-called "ground plane" although not technically correct) it can do a decent job of restoring the half of the antenna that's attached to the shield of the coax, and that on a hole mount through a metal cab would be supplied by that very metal cab.

Bonding the antenna mount's mounting screws to various bolts, regardless of their number and shortness, will have no functional benefit if the wire cage and frame bits so bonded are not physically at the exact (well, more or less) height as the grounded part of the feedpoint (where the coax attaches to the visible antenna), which should not be any lower or otherwise appreciably offset from the feedpoint.

Some folks have reported huge benefits by running a "ground" lead some great distance, typically to the battery, even though DC (battery) ground has absolutely nothing to do with RF counterpoise, except for those cases where said "ground lead" happens to be about 9-10 feet long, when it approximates a quarter-wavelength at CB frequencies. At that point, you can think of it as a V-antenna, functioning substantially as a dipole.

I've got a similar design in one of my backyard antennas. It's 80 ft long on each leg, fed with "ladder line", and with a tuner I've worked eight-to-ten thousand miles with two watts. There's no CB or ham band that's resonant at its length, hence the matching device.

But I *do* have a CB whip attached on the fascia above my shack window, with just a single 114" counterpoise wire running along the fascia, and it works great with stock power.

A separate idea, if one is not of a mechanical bent for bracket modification, is the easy fabrication of a genuine roof counterpoise on the *inside* of the cab. I mentioned it in a Post #4 in this link:

http://www.thetruckersreport.com/tr...igh-swr-whats-next.html?highlight=copper+foil

awhile back. It's what we had to do in the raised roof of a couple of the ambulances I commanded in a previous life. Made all the difference in the world for our CB, VHF, and UHF link antennas, and kept all the antennas up high & in the clear.

Also, whatever you do, try to remember that a 1:1 SWR match does *not* imply a perfectly functioning antenna; it merely says that you've got a 50-ohm load present. So does a coax full of water, or a good dummy load. Even a perfect "ground plane" antenna has an impedance of around 35 ohms at resonance; a perfect dipole has a 72-ohm impedance. EITHER ONE will show about a 1.5:1 SWR. Putting magical elements on an antenna, or fiddling with coax length to change the SWR to 1:1 will likely either have no real-world benefit, or may actually hinder your antenna system's efficiency.

Hope those helps some.

73