Cascadia dipole?

They used to do repairs and it's probably worth calling them and asking them

 

You overlooked the 'flat terrain' portion of my comment, I suppose? Elevation has a HUGE impact on line of sight communication distance. There's also the tropospheric ducting phenomenon, but that's relatively rare and out of the scope of this thread.

 

30 miles on flat Terrain mobile to mobile seems to be about average with a good receiver on either end.
60 miles mobile to mobile happens occasionally but not often and usually a mountain is involved.
Like the time I was on Interstate 40 at mile marker 121 in New Mexico and I heard a guy say back it down eastbound we're coming to a stop at the 181. Seems like that would only happen about once a month at that distance

 

How did I miss anything? You said no more than 3-4 miles range on flat terrain regardless of antenna. I pointed out a 26 mile mobile to mobile contact in flat as a pancake northern IL. And 2 other contacts where there was actual terrain, both well above 3-4 miles.

I'm not sure what I missed. And the band being open actually reduces local range, as local signals get buried under all the skip from people running high power stations.

 

Maybe he got accustomed to a stock Cobra 29 noisy staticy receiver that doesn't hear very far and maybe he assumed that everyone else has noisy receive as well

 

Noisy and detuned from the factory.

 

A battery powered walkie talkie with a 10 inch rubber ducky antenna would have no problem making it into my receiver on flat Terrain at a distance of 10 miles on a quiet day

 

It looks like that antenna system is grounded to the door of the truck which renders it ineffective. You need to isolate the antenna system from the vehicle electrically.