More power?

How is it talking so far, with it mounted on mirror

 

2 miles is pretty lousy. I effortlessly made an 11 mile contact yesterday, in a pretty noisy area. I've done 20+ numerous times.

I run a 7' Firestik as a dipole:


The tilt is to account for flexing. At speed it stands straight up. SWR is perfect across the band.

 

csw1818 you have a similar mount but different system. As yours is configured you still are using the mount and truck as the ground plane. If you look a bit closer at volvo244t's picture you will see he has a vertically mounted antenna below the mount to act as counterpoise making his antenna a Dipole and not relying on the iffy ground plane provided by the Cascadia.

 

Here is my version of a dipole. I used a mount designed to hold both am/fm antenna and cb antenna. I removed the insulator from the am/fm mount and turned it downward then moved the cb antenna to center hole and attached bar to mount with the third hole after insulating mount from birdperch(rabbiporkchops suggestion) the swr is 1.3. there might be further tweaking to be done but performance has been much better as is.

 

I kind of know a bit about radio but don't know nothing about dipole antenna?!?

Always tought that skipshooters were the only 7" antenna in the market, i have never been able to adjust my skipshooter so went back with something that always work for me predator but in few weeks will try the sirio.

 

A dipole antenna in it's simplest form means that one side of the antenna works as driven element while the other acts as the counterpoise or ground for the antenna. Mine the swr was better insulating it from the perch. On Volvo244t's it looks as if his counterpoise is grounded to the perch perhaps the longer antenna on his makes a difference. It looks as if he used 2 regular mounts to form his dipole where I used a single mount. The mount I slightly rearranged to make my dipole used to be commonly used by slipseat drivers for the big union companies whose contract did not require them to provide in cab radios for the drivers. So drivers often would buy "slipseat boxes" with their personal am/fm stereos, cb's and speaker systems in a small suitcase type box. then they would use a visegrip style mount with the am/fm antenna on one end and the cb antenna on the other with the visegrips in the middle. I found my mount at Big Boys truckstop I-95 NC exit 105. It is unlikely but not impossible you will find those mounts at the big box truckstops unless they also have a dedicated cb shop.