couple questions

How do you know you are getting out 6 to 7 miles?

I mean are you not hearing anyone beyond 6 or 7 miles?

With 250 watts or what ever, you can stick a wire out the window and should cover 10 miles.

 

you need to try more radio checks i had a 80watt driver

on my cobra 29 and i talked 35 miles or more easy

 

With that set up working properly, you should be good for more like 15 miles ONLY if the other radio is set up right too. There are always conditions and issues that can effect distance.

 

Maybe it was his radio?

 

Yes it could be his radio, many newer trucks have so much static that although you were booming @ 250watt, it just broke his level of noise.

you also say swr @ 2, I'd try to get that down.

 

My .02 lower that deadkey to 1.0 at a minimum and then adjust that swr to 1.0 or as close as possible. Should clear up your issue, the dead key is where your having the issue im thinking.

 

The communications path goes all the way from one mic to the other user's speaker. If your antenna system is working correctly and has an adequate counterpoise (everyone calls it a "ground plane", and that's OK), AND if the other users also have systems that are working correctly, you *should* be able to talk 6 or 7 miles barefoot.

FWIW, SWR should be set barefoot. Then, if it goes up substantially when you kick in the footwarmer, then the latter is putting out spurs that are being "filtered" out before they ever leave the antenna, and show up as increased reflected voltage, i.e., higher SWR.

If available, an antenna analyzer will give a lot more info than a simple SWR meter, but they're a lot more spendy, and more of an investment than the casual user probably needs for taking care of just one or two installations. Many shops these days use them because they're faster and more accurate, and can quickly pay for themselves.

At a 2.0:1 SWR, you're only losing 11% of the signal through your antenna (both on transmit and receive). While that's measurable, it'll probably never be noticed in actual performance -- if you weren't looking at a meter, you'd never detect the difference, and neither would "the other guy".

Not sure what jumper was found to be off, though... ?

73

 

the whip can be clipped to tune it also but the deadkey need s to be matched with that amp

6watt dead key is too high unless its a high driver amp

1 watt - 2.5 sometimes 3 is the best bet

otherwise it will sound distorted to drivers and swr will jump around