Galaxy 98vhp- who has best price and can tech very well.

Bells CB is where i bought mine about 8 months ago. Not one issue and they did a great job.
That radio takes tons of power so be prepared to run real heavy power wires direct to the battery.
Also the very best performing microphone for that radio is the Ranger SRA 198....He sells them for 25 bucks. Rock solid mic and super clean sound.
Way better than the new Road King or Astatic.

Call them and talk to Screwdriver....he will even make you a video when he works on your radio.....great guy.

Oh,it already had blue LEDs and backlit face.
Convert,Align and tune is all you need.

http://www.bellscb.com/products/tenmeter/galaxy/Galaxy_DX_98VHP.htm

 

i own a stryker and have no noise issues. but have heard of complaints from some "peak and tune" shops

 

Bre, first off, what is your roof's skin made of -- is it metal or some sort of plastic/composite/Fibreglas®? If it isn't metal, you're going to have to either hang a vertical dipole off one mirror mount, or simulate a metal roof by installing a copper or aluminum foil "spider web" on the inside of the cab roof (above the headliner & insulation -- RIGHT on the bottom of the cab shell) so a regular antenna will have a metallic counterpoise ("ground plane" in the vernacular) for the antenna to work against. You can do a search in our CB Forum for either "vertical dipole" or "copper foil" for threads containing the instructions.

Secondly, as cool as blue lights look, if you will be driving at night, *please* Google the phrase "vision purple" (with the quotes, and in that word order). You'll quickly see how badly blue lights, especially in a darkened environment, desensitize your eyes' ability to adjusting to the lower light environment outside your truck, and for how long the effect lasts.

Lots of the U.S. has gone to blue lights for police vehicles, leaving red for fire & EMS. And most light bar manufacturers have "day/night" switches for the light bars' intensities, something drastic light 200,000 candlepower for daytime use, and under 10,000 for night time. Lots of blue light users (I'm retired from it myself) get excited during a pursuit or other emergency run, and along with leaving their wig-wag headlights on at night (definitely no-no, even though not specifically prohibited by most states' laws), they also either conveniently "forget" to turn their emergency lights to "night" after dusk, or leave them on "cuz we can". Sometimes it's an all-too-cavalier attitude of "I'm the police, I can do anything i want, and I want to make sure that cars 4 miles ahead see me", never realizing that once they arrive at their stop, they won't have to stare at their own lights like the poor shnooks they've just rolled up on will, instilling almost complete night blindness for 20 minutes or more. And that the blue strobes or rotating lights are so drastically bright compared to everything else at the scene that other drivers can't see the emergency personnel moving around at the scene, or trying to direct traffic with anemic red wands on flashlights, or nearly anything else that might (and should!) otherwise be visible to the average driver.

So----- if you really want blue lights on your radio, I'd implore you to have either a dimmer pot (hard to do with LEDs), or a dimmer toggle that drastically limits the current through the LEDs so that the radio merely glows softly when it's dark around you.

If you can read by the light of your Nitro Knobs™ at 20 paces in the dark, chances are that your pupils will look like a heroin overdose patient's, and you won't be able to see normally for ~20 - 30 minutes after you shut them off.

And yes, I've got one Cobra 29BT with blue Nitro Knobs™ that I took in on trade. It occupies a place of relative prominence in my shop, bolted under the bench. That way when I get tired of watching oscilloscope displays after awhile, I get on the air and yack a little. The bench is already well lit, much brighter than any tractor's cabin, so the light isn't so much brighter than my lab's ambient lighting that it makes much of a difference. And if I get too fatigued, I can just hit the bench master disconnect, kill power to everything, and go nighty-night with no neurological deficits.

But if you're gonna have blue knobs and indicators in a working truck, *please* make some provision to dim them severely, even if it's just a piece of exposed (blackened) X-ray film that you can swing or hinge down over the face of the radio. That will still let you see the indicators without figuratively projecting a fluoroscopic display of your skeleton on the back window of the cab......

73, and please drive safely

 

Yeah but those blue lights look so cool!

 

Mike --
They do indeed. If I were driving with a blue billboard on my dash, I think the last thing I'd do on a leg of a journey would be to pull into the TS, turn on the blue lights, go in and get a "beverage" of some sort, and after I went night-blind, turn it off and crawl into the sleeper

Enjoy, & 73.

 

Blue lights hurt my eyes in the dark. Mine stay real dim.

On the antenna I tried a Wilson Trucker 5000,It did well but then switched to a Monkey Made MM-9.
The MM-9 seemed to hear a little better.
Biggest thing is grounding and SWR.

 

Funny you bring this up. I just purchased a 98VHP over the weekend. I didn't need it but it sorta jumped out at me and I got a fairly good deal on it.

As mentioned, yes this radio you MUST hook straight to the battery. It has 8 ga. wire - bigger than any of the wiring in your cab.

Yes the blue lights are bright. However the radio does have a rotary dimmer on the front so you can adjust. Very cool feature. I am presuming this is your issue with blue lights?

As for the antenna, I recommend the Wilson 2k trucker.

Getting out 30 miles I think is going to be a real stretch for this radio unless you hook it up on a base station antenna and run it indoors. There's an old saying in CB antennas..."height is might"....meaning the higher the antenna goes, the better it receives and the better the radio it's hooked to, transmits.

If anything you *might* get 15 miles with the antenna I said to get...and that's a big maybe. Don't forget if skip is rolling, you might end up talking 500 miles, but not getting to the guy 15 miles away.

Speaking of skip, made 2 contacts from MO to CA yesterday on this 98VHP on 38 LSB. I got a few reports of being off frequency....which is a bummer....Galaxys drift, yet mine was indoors all day in 70 degree room temp.

Oh yeah....I had a guy tell me that my Astatic 575-M6 mic really made this radio come to life as opposed to the stock mic, all else being equal.