CB/Antenna choice opinions

If you want it to "get out well" a 4 foot antenna is not going to cut it. Not unless your idea of "getting out well" is a mile.

If you can I strongly suggest a 102 whip antenna with the matching barrel spring, mounted on the roof of the vehicle. Both of these can be bought at Radio Shack and as long as you have a low 1.5:1 SWR, a standard 4 watt CB can be made to talk 10 miles.

 

Yup, what Turbo said. If 8-1/2 ft of antenna on top of the roof will be too tall for you, the top of the roof (assuming it's a metal roof) is still be best place to put whatever antenna you've got. And, at least in antennas, bigger *is* better. Well, longer is better.
Think of the antenna as a sail and the radio signals as wind (when you're receiving). A full-size sail is the 102" whip, with or without the spring as needed for tuning or obstructions. (Sometimes with a spring one has to take a little bit off the whip -- but I digress.)
Shortened antennas work by replacing some of the physical length with a coil. A 4-ft fiberglass CB antenna has wire wound around the glass rod at varying pitches. to make the radio think it's got a full 8-footer hooked up. Like only unfurling half of a sail, and leaving the rest stacked on the boom. It's still there, but it's not doing anything to catch the wind that's going over the top of the sail.
A 2-ft antenna is the same, but worse.
Fiberglass does have the advantage of staying more nearly vertical when you're going down the road, as opposed to a 102" steel whip, but it's also less forgiving when you hit something with it.
So -- I'll tell you what *I* use, and let you kinda see the comparisons. First off, I hold a commercial FCC tech license, so all my CBs are at legal power and modulation (I'm told they also sound great, but again I digress). I drive a Plymouth van. I've got 4 different antennas I switch between, depending upon what I need. Center roof I have an "NMO" mount, made for VHF & UHF commercial & public safety antennas. I have a base loaded steel Maxrad antenna that mates directly with the NMO mount. It works quite well, but it's made for maximum durability. Plus, it matches the four other NMO antennas on the roof on VHF & UHF (I'm a ham, too).
With an adapter, I can put either my 2-ft or 4-ft Barjan fiberglass antennas on there. I use the 2-ft a lot, because with the nearly-ideal ground plane that the van roof represents, and good coax that's properly installed, I can talk reliably 10-15 miles to a base station with it, and I can get into my garage with it installed.
The 4-ft Barjan gives measurably stronger performance, nearly 1 S-unit on receive, but it also applies a lot of leverage against the van's roof when I'm at speed, so I don't use that one. Mechanically it's just not sound enough for me, but would be if I had some sort of reinforcement under the roof skin. I do use that one on a hood lip mount, but it picks up more engine noise there, and the performance is only about as good as the 2-ft on the middle of the roof.
When I'm going to be out of town, I put the 102-inch with spring on the stainless ball on the left rear fender, just below the rear wing window. Most of the whip is above the roof line, and nearly none of it is next to metal on its way up. It's much more sensitive than any of the others, it talks out about 18-20 miles reliably, and it's farthest from the engine noise. But -- I can't get it in my garage, and sometimes it even hits the overhangs at gas stations. Performance-wise, however, it's a no-compromise solution, except for slightly less signal off the left and rear of the van, cuz there's no ground plane in that direction.
Plus I can take off the spring and use it for 10 Meters.
So, depending upon how much overhead space you've got...hmm....have you got room for a 5- or 6-footer on your roof?
Antennas are for talking and hearing; if you can't hear 'em, you can't work 'em.
Hope this helps,
-- Handlebar --

 

Thats cool HB. When I was big in the CBs back in the day. I had a galaxy 44 peaked and tweet with a power mod and a 102 steel whip on my truck. At the house I had a galaxy 2527 base station with a 21 foot ugly stick. Could near bout talk around the world on either one. I kinda miss it. I may hook it all back up.

 

Bama -- nice setup. Sunspots are on the upswing cycle; big-time solar flares past 3 days, too. Nice skip going right now. Oughta take a couple of hours, get the antenna on a joint of 1-1/2" water pipe bracketed to the side of the house and get on the air

Buckeye -- I should have asked: are you looking for something for your work truck or your private cruiser? If it's a big truck, is the roof fiberglass? And how high is the roof above ground?
-- Handlebar --

 

hey is it legal to modify ur cb to get more power/range?and antennas..is there a way to have dual antennas?see my rig is got two 4' on each mirror and is got two antenna cable coming to the CB housing...the plugs look like the type you connect to the back of an stereo not the screw on type like the back of the CB's...any ideas?

 

Easy answer is "no" on modifying the radio, with the caveat that if your radio isn't performing as specified power and receive sensitivity, performance will suffer somewhat. But it's not legal to increase power beyond 4 watts on AM and 12 watts on SSB.
I don't know why you'd have RCA plugs on a CB antenna system, unless they're actually Motorola plugs like the ones used on be-bop radios.
Your antenna system is in danger of burning up your transmitter if you key down for very long. If you have two "proper" cophased antenna pairs, with one antenna from each harness on each side, and the two coaxes coming together in a coax "tee" behind your radio, then your radio is seeing a 26-ohm load instead of the 52-ohms it needs. If everything else is *perfect*, the best SWR you will have is 2.0:1. Kind of like running a 2-cylinder engine into a straight pipe.
If what you have on each mirror is a dual antenna bracket, with one coax going from it to the radio, then each bracket has about 26 ohms impedance, then a mismatched coax (52 ohms) to your tee connector. The overall impedance is something I can't calculate because of too many unknowns, but is likely to be even worse than the first example.
My suggestion, if you've got two factory-supplied cophased antenna sets, is to remove the tee and plug just one of the sets into your radio. Leave the other one there as a spare in case something fails.
If you've got the second example, take one antenna off each bracket, and if the coax is all regular 52-ohm style, pull it out and replace it with a 72-ohm cophasing harness.
Or just put a single 52-ohm coax to a single antenna on one bracket.
On the other hand, it must look really cool! Carry a spare radio so that when the current one blows up, you won't be off the air for long after you fix the antennas.

 

Good advise!

 

wilson and monkey made are both good choices as long as you tune them right

 

AND how do you know if you did it right ?