Inline SWR Meter Advice

It's hard to screw up a VSWR meter. The one ROADPRO meter that I had here had 2 meters and worked JUST FINE.

As a CBer I don't realy know why you need a inline meter Mine are built into the antenna tuner and i use that to cover a wide range of bands.

As far as which is best ...... Well to be honest i have found many of them even the cheap ones are almost as good as my BIRD# 43. Pick out one that will do what you need my guess is power VSWR and modulation and enjoy your toy.

 

The SWR bridge built into most radios now are very good, unless your radio does not have it or you have a reason to believe it is not correct. The normal inline meter for CB are fairly accurate in my experience.

There not my Bird or thru-line but there not several hundred dollars either. I personally would ude it to check the one built into the radio but would not leave it in line all the time. Just not needed. IMHO.

 

get a Palstar and be done with it....


http://www.palstar.com/pm2000am.php

the eham reviews

http://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/7148

 

If I change out one CB radio for another, using the same antenna, might that change the SWR? Like, is it required to retrim the antenna?

 

not usually, but if you were to change coax, antenna, or mount, etc then you should prolly recheck SWR just to be safe..

 

Once your swr is set you can change radios as much as you want and your swr would not change unless you change another component besides the radio.



OP, what kind of radio you running? If your running a stock cb radio then you don't need an inline all the time. If your swr gets out of whack your warning light will let you know and it won't damage the radio as long as you fix it soon after it happens. The other option you might want to look at is getting a new antenna setup that doesn't hit bridges would be my suggestion.

 

Get you a radio shack SWR meter and zip tie it to the CB. Yes a little redneck but it does work. That's how I used to have mine.