What's a Tune & Align? - Leave it Stock?

Just get a cobra 29 classic LTD without the other stuff. The BT feature on the BT radios is crap for the most part. You have to run a special Mic for it to work at all and there are very few places that have decent BT mics to work with the radio. The weather feature is also crap at best. The visibility of the panel on the NW radios is also not the best during the day. You have to dial the dimmer back so far that the channel display is hard to see during the day and at night you have to keep it dialed back (dark) or it lights up the whole cab which takes away night time visibility since it gets bright enough to diolate (sp) your pupils. Stay away from any radio that has Blue LEDs (lighting) again they are way to bright at night making it hard to see the road and ditch. Talkback is also an unneeded feature as all it does is let you hear yourself talk.

For all that matters, one of the best basic radios is the cobra 25 classicSmaller chassis then the 29 yet has all the same performance available to it that the 29 has yet a cheaper price tag. Yiu will never use the delta tune feature of the 29 anyway. Kind of a worthless feature in my opinion.

The only thing about some of the 29s that I like is that some of them have a switch for normal, channel 19 and channel 9. I can have the normal side set to a certain channel which in my case is the farm channel or our company channel then I can simply flip the switch for channel 19. It also has a tone channel to adjust how the speaker sounds ie high or low. Mine is a night watch but I want to disable the backlighting on the face plate but leave the meter and channel display alone.

If you really want talk back then get an external speaker that has talk back built into it. You will want an external speaker anyway as the speaker in the cobra radios are trash at best. External speakers sound 1000 times better. I have mine mounted just above and to the left of my head.

 

I run astatic 636 noise canceling mics. I am not fond of the non NC mics because you hear everything going on in the cab of the rig the other person is driving. If they have a window open then you can hardly understand them. I don't use powered mics. Everyone I have ever heard sounded bad. Nothing beats a nice clean sounding mic when you are the person listening.

Doug at custom CB radios is modifying astatic 636 mics to work witht he BT feature.

I run a blue parrot BT headset which in my opion is the best in the business. So no need for a bluetooth CB radio.

 

I can not recall the last radio that did not perform up to legal fcc spec right out of the box, This includes many years of installing, programing, and performing fcc certs form Motorola, RCA, and GE.

The odds of receiving a COBRA new out of the box needing a tune up is like finding a MeDonalds out of hamburgers.

New radios will be 90%+ modulation # 4 watts.

Buy a Roadking noise canceling mic, and a external speaker you'll be in good shape.

The other myth is that the internal SWR bridge built into the radio is not accurate, and I have never found this true. The internal metering built into the COBRA radio is dependable, accurate enought unless a super tech has been in there tuning things that they do not know what they are.