Next question with my swrs: steel or aluminum mount?

A steel mount is fine. It does not have to be Aluminum.

 

length of jumpers should not affect your SWR right...lot more info needed here tho on whats going on...

 

First off, it's SWR. There's only one "signal wave ratio". Not two or three or .................... That being said it won't matter steel or aluminum. Have you metered it? What's your current SWR? What makes you think you have an issue?

 

Actually it's Standing Wave Ratio just to be exact and your right need allot more info on this issue to try and help.

 

I can't really explain your results without seeing what you did, and might not could explain it then! You need to be sure and clean all the paint off down to bare metal where you make your connections. The typical way is from the ant. mount to door frame, (sometimes this step isn't needed and you start with the second step) then another one across the hinge from the door to the body, then from the body to the frame. If you didn't see any change at all I would suspect you didn't get good contact or you need more bonding straps.

I used a 1 inch braided strap from my pick-up bed to the frame one time and didn't see any difference either. I was told to bond each corner of the bed. I choose to mount the antenna in the middle of the roof, on the cab, and everything was good.

Maybe one of the experts will chime in with more suggestions.........

 

Grabbing the antenna and lowering SWR is meaningless to the issue as all they are doing is using their body to adsorb radiation. Radiation adsorbed is not reflecting back so your meter indicates a lower SWR. Still sounds like you have a grounding problem but you need to post some Hires pics so we can see what is going on.

 

Well the 2012 uses the mounts on the body on the side of the sleeper area. Did your truck have or does it have those mounts? The body in that area is aluminum.

Are you using the factory coax? If it is the factory coax, was it made for two antennas? One on each side.

If the mounts are still there for the factory location like shown with the yellow arrow, I would use the factory location.

If it has co-phased coax (2 connections for two antennas) and you are only using one of the two connections, that could cause an abnormal SWR.

Let us know what you have, maybe a picture of your truck on the antenna side?

 

I'm very familiar with that model of Freightliner. On our company trucks the right side is the am/fm, the left CB. The coax, however, goes thru at least 4 different junctions on some models and as high as eight on others. And it is a skinny little coax of some kind. Some will have a good SWR, some will be up in the red. None of them will hear or talk as far as you can see. Finding another location for your antenna is the only solution I have found. Many of our drivers have mounted antenna's on the back of the cab. Lowers the SWR, but performs only marginally better than the factory set up. The best solution so far is using the mount that attaches to the mirror, (see below) and doing some bonding. Walcott is the only place I know of that sells these.....I made my own out of stainless steel, these are aluminum.
http://www.walcottcb.com/cas1-freightliner-cascadia-antenna-mount-p-2062.html?cPath=28_353_436