Four wheeler/escort vehicle CB questions.

way over my head

 

MFJ=mighty fine junk

 

Yep you have that right.

 

That radio you had linked to is nothing more then a regular cobra 29 with a digital face on it. Internally they are both the same which means they both perform the same. Forget abotu any cb that has a bunch of noise crap installed or eco and reverb. Most real drivers hate listening to that stuff. It is unprofessional. One thing I really like about the 29LTD is the instant 19-9 and normal switch. I can put it on normal and set the channel to our "company" or "farm" channel and leave it then use the switch to instantly go back to 19.

As for antennas. Get your light bar installed, purchase a wilson 2000 with a ten inch shaft and get it mounted to the light bar rack. Make sure the light bar rack is well grounded to the chassis of the pickup. Put the antenna in the center of the rack. Get the antenna tuned properly to an swr of 1.5:1 or lower.

For radio mounting, make sure you have a good steady mount and not just lay it somewere. Make sure the ground wire for the power lead is properly grounded Some say it is best to run the positive and negative leads right to the battery.

Get a good non powered noise canceling mic. I like the astatic 636 personally but many like the Road King 56 or the skythumper SK65. Most noise canceling mics need to be held just a few inches from you mouth. The non noise canceling mics and the powered mics tend to pick up too much other noise from inside the cab which can make your tranmission hard to understand at times.

Adjust the mic gain or dynamic so that you can be clearly heard with out being overly loud. Usually just past the 12:00 position unless you are a quiet talker then you may need to turn it up some more.

Set the squelch all the way counter clockwise and dial back the rf gain till the noise is just barely audible.

Do these and I would bet money that you will easily get out past 5 miles and upto 10 miles when conditions are not too busy on the radio. Heck up here in North Dakota we usually get out past 15 miles with a regular CB. Mine will do more then that but I run a little more power then the rest.

As far as non cb comunications, handheld comunicators that people use for hunting etc can easily get out to 20 miles, line of sight. They are inexpensive at less then 80 bucks for the higher end models in packages of two, including chargers and vox headsets. Thes would be awsome for comunication between the truck and the pilot car because there is little to no traffic on them.

 

I'm with Rat on the echo, I've asked more than one escort to turn it off. An escort that brough a set of non-cb handhelds would be very likely to get repeat business from me.

 

We use them little comunicators alot around here. and they work great. I worked for an excavating company driving a dump or hauling their equipment and we used them alot and could easily go over 15 miles with clear comunication. We also use them while on the scooters (I own a harley) or on the atvs. The vox headsets work great for this.

As far as the eco and all that other stuff, I can't hardly uderstand what people say when they have it on. It makes it harder when you run into accents that you are not used to. I find it really hard to under stand the southern drivers even without eco muchless with eco etc. I don't know if the have an emergency or not so I just have to try and ignore them.

 

You'd probably have to get an interpreter for me! When I get up your way, I sometimes try to think about talking like I'm typing it out, without abbreviations.

 

The only feature I like about that radio is the scan feature. Other then that I would not pay the extra just to have a digital face. If that is what you like then go for it. My main concern is the longitivity of the leds in the digital face. I have seen too many leds go bad in the channel selector on cobra radios and I wonder how this is going to effect the longitivity of the LE faceplate.