Antenna men for mobile?

How the antenna attaches to the truck is probably the most important part of your installation. It's well worth your time to spend a weekend cutting and grinding and drilling to make a custom piece out of stainless steel.

 

It's kind of hard to break a piece of stainless steel that's a quarter inch thick.
I'd spend most of my time constructing a bracket that will bolt directly onto the truck without drilling any holes in the truck. That's going to be the most amount of work. The rest of it is easy stuff. I'd make a spacer plate that drops down into that hole and then make another plate that sits on top of it which hangs out past the mirror arm. Then you get the four holes to line up. Then you figure out how deep the holes are and then you have to do some math to figure out how long the bolts need to be and then you can get some stainless steel Bolts from Fastenal and stick some anti-seize down in the holes of the aluminum mirror arm and then torque everything nice and snug and then you have a solid foundation to mount your antenna.

 

That's the price you pay for mounting your radio inside something other than a Chevy Suburban. You're never going to get omnidirectional out of a tractor trailer.

 

If you can get it mounted on that bracket at a 45 degree angle leaning forward, you won't have to worry about it hitting the body of the truck even at 75 mile an hour. The guy that I know that is using a 9-foot whip on his Cascadia doesn't have anything bracing it and it flops all over the place when the wind is blowing but it never touches the body of the truck.

 

Personally I wouldn't let anybody east of the Mississippi touch your antenna system. I'd volunteer to get it dialed in for you for free if you did all the hard work and have that bracket made and have everything all hooked up and ready to go. I've got a couple antenna analyzers and an ohm meter and a die grinder for trimming if necessary.

 

Hey, Wapwallopen, what about your fellow Pennsylvanians TOP GUN TEC 680/880 extension?

A 108” is a helluva wind load. I just bought another pair from DX ENGINEERING.

But I ran 7’ Skipshooters on a Cascadia with the PRO COMM Mount. The 6’ version might be easiest to live with on a KW company truck.

Sorry I don’t get up to PA anymore. I don’t miss the parking near Allentown or daily in & out of Philly (wow).

But it’d be fun to be a pair of missing tooth truck drivers causing Ridgeline fits with some Rube Goldberg antenna concoctions. Just for those “proud papa” moments in pictures, why, I’d get me a chain-drive wallet, profane tee shirt, and temporary facial tattoos.

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