High swr

Opening doors can and will have a negative affect. If your swr is higher on 40 than it is on 1, your antenna needs to be shortened. Any grounding should be short. A long ground wire tries to radiate.

 

If you run grounds/bonding, use braided cable (coax will work). Keep all runs under 18". Antenna mount to mirror mount; door to body, body to frame.

 

That's interesting...keep grounds short. My buddy has a 386 all fiberglass Peterbilt that he had to run grounds from the antenna mounts to the negative terminals on the batteries themselves to obtain a decent ground. He used regular 12-14 ga. automotive wire too. His SWR is 1.5 all the time.

 

Running a ground wire from your antenna bracket to a DC ground stud or post is not the way to do it. It may show good results on a swr meter but don't do it. If you have an old coax, strip the shield part out. I use a razor blade knife and cut just through the outside casing the long way down the coax. Pull that off and you should be looking at the shield that is easy at that point to pull off. I put small ring terminals on the ends then go from antenna bracket to door hinge to inside door hinge. What you need to do here is avoid one long ground wire/strap.

 

May have to do with where your parked. Bldgs, trees etc can cause high swr. The strange deal is you say ch 11 is good, but 1 & 40 are not. Very strange

 

Keep 'em short as possible. Another thing is: it is almost impossible to keep one's SWR at an "ideal" level all the time. As a mobile, your environment thru which you travel *can* have a effect on it. But you won't "know" it unless you have an inline SWR or built-in in place. Cars, other trucks, metal buildings, trees--all can effect SWR. The buddy who ran a ground straight to battery was just "lucky", and indeed, it IS proper to run grounds to the battery, but LONG grounds can cause problems such as "biting" (mild shock) of lips by the mike because RF is traveling over them. These are called "resonant" grounds where the length of the ground equals approximately the length of the whip, or radiating element. RF likes to travel over these and also NOISE----like engine noises, pops and crackles that might not be there. Ideally, one should not only run grounds to the battery, but SHORT ones from the radio to nearest known ground source. Two trains of thought exist on this. Me, I was taught to "ground, ground, ground" and that one couldn't have too many!

GF

 

I just solder the ring terminals to the shield and center conductor and use it all. No stripping out or anything. It seems to work just fine.

 

I just had that same occurrence yesterday. Threw my magnet mount lil Wil on my jeep and hooked up a radio, and I had 1.3 on 19, but nearly 2.0 on 1 and 40.