good cb shop near st louis?

T-Back is "talk back" I'm thinking. Probably adjusts how loud you sound in your speaker when you talk. I always leave the RF gain wide open and use the squelch.

 

So you can buy these horseshoe birdperch mounts at Petro??

I found this thread on google, by the way.

 

That Petro in San Antonio is handy. I'll have to check that one out.

If not, I will get one from Mr. Clay.

Thanks for the comeback.

 

Well, I finally got my horseshoe bird perch installed. I let the shop install the perch, and I did the rest.

I purchased a 5.5 ft Francis antenna. That was the tallest antenna I could find at the moment. I had a 9ft piece of RG58 coax and used that.

On a whim, I told the man behind the counter that I was going to run the coax thru the door. I asked him if he had anything that would protect the coax from getting pinched.

I expected no answer.

He said yes, and ran back to another room, and then came back with some wireing harness material. It is the same material you would see if you looked under the hood of any car. He gave me for free two long strips of it. That is what you see where the coax enters the door. Hopefully, it works for a while anyway.

I have no SWR numbers because the meter and meter light doesn't work. But I think I have a good ground because I was picking up skip right off the bat. Talked on the radio a little bit, and every thing seemed fine.

Thanks double yellow for starting this thread. I will report back in a week or two after the radio gets looked at.

 

Since I've ran than set-up in every conceivable way, I can tell you your SWR is NOT optimal. It may be safe to operate, and it will perform way better than the stock set-up, but it won't be what I would call good. The higher you can get the "load" above the cab, the better the SWR will be.....thus the 7 footers that work so well.

 

On the second trip, the cb meter started working. SWR check did show a reading of greater than 2. It's hard to see with the meter light out. Lol.

So now I'm thinking ground wire to the door. Then maybe to the frame.

I will get to Clays hopefully soon and see if he can help.

 

Biggest antenna Clay's got that's top-loaded is a 5 footer. Go to Bob's CB shop in Strattanville, PA (I-80 exit 70) or Ray's CB shop in West Memphis, by the Petro. Those guys have 7-footers in stock. 7-footers are not widely available, and not even the venerable Walcott CB has them in stock. (Biggest they have is the 6-foot Firestik)

 

That all said, I had decent results with a Francis 5.5 - 1.3 across the band - don't think the field strength was all that great, though, but it did get better when I added the counterpoise.

I still have the Frances 5.5 in the truck as an emergency back-up antenna since it did work half decently.

 

Was it better lower in frequency or worse? I can't remember exactly how mine tuned, just remember it wasn't the best. I check all the way down to 26.735 at least.