Bells cb and why...

I've always said short of him you're better off buying a radio from amazon.com and plug it in and use it and don't let anybody touch it. The radios that get the farthest distance from me and can still be heard by me at the greatest distance are bone stock right out of the box and radios worked on by the guy that did mine. Anything worked on by anyone else will always perform less than stock. There's plenty of shops that do decent repairs but they're completely clueless when it comes to Tunes, unless it's something simple like a Cobra 2000. That's my personal experience. I hate to see people waste money only to get less performance than a stock radio. More watts on a meter means absolutely nothing except you got robbed of your hard earned money.
Amazon is accessible by anyone with a mailing address. So is EBay.

 

I haven't lost my mind. Quite the opposite actually. I'm pretty good understanding the laws of probability. I'm sure that seems like a foreign concept to many people but how many shops you think exist in this country? If his work is better than 260 others what are the odds that you're going to accidentally stumble across someone who does equal or better? Anybody who thinks they can defy the laws of probability is completely insane. As I've always said, a bone stock Cobra 29 is going to be the best performing radio you have ever had in your possession assuming you understand anything about doing your own antenna work which seems kind of dubious. Anything else will always result in less performance . There's a reason the ham guys try to steer you in the right direction but I don't think you quite understand it. If I can hear your Cobra 29 30 miles away but I can only hear your export radio from 10 miles away did you actually receive any benefit by quadrupling the amount of money that you spent?

 

There's really nothing to argue about. Distortion is your number one enemy in regards to Performance. FCC type accepted single final radios generally don't have much distortion, while export radios with dual finals always have distortion since the transistors are always mismatched. There's one guy in the country that can sweep any radio including the infamous 98vhp from 300 Hertz to 7,000 Hertz with virtually zero distortion anywhere in between. That would not be possible with the factory transistors. There's hundreds of con artists that will follow a service manual and deceptively inject a 1K tone and show you a nice looking waveform at 1 k but deliberately conceal Distortion elsewhere at other tones. Tell screwdriver to show us something like this if he's capable. Until then I'm not impressed. Screwdriver can't even show us a textbook waveform with a 1K tone.

 

At the end of your post, you are asking if there’s any good cb shops for us common drivers.... if you go to the “CB shops white list” (it’s currently on page 10 of the threads), it may give you some ideas about other good cb shops. Just FYI.

Also, if you look at the bright side, you probably saved around $300 or so, since you couldn’t reach mr. Sherman. Now you have the extra money to buy a second radio. Sounds like a win-win situation to me...lol. The bottom line is that you are happy with your new radio and that’s all that matters.

 

I will add my two cents...
Back in the day, I had a couple of regular CBs that Mark worked on when he had a shop in a truck stop in northern Ohio (Uniden 78LTW). I've had none since that received as well or got as many compliments on how clean they sounded.

That being said....
I will buy a stock radio off Amazon (the next time I need one) and call it good after I make as sure as possible that my antenna system as as good as I can get it.
I no longer have Facebook and will not sign up for it to jump through Mark's hoops.

 

From the sounds of it he got more for his money. Probably twice the performance for a quarter of the price which makes him the smarter consumer.