Inspiration comes standard Stryker SR-A10 CB antenna

When I bought it, I was a little new to radios. Not too long afterwards, the channel selector locked up, the frequency counter ceased working, and then it just quit altogether. I wrote it off to a golden screwdriver hackjob I guess. I figured if they discontinued it after less than a 5 year run, it must have not been worth making.

 

I would be inspired alright. To trade it on a predator 10k.

 

That wasn't it...FCC came down on Cobra for selling it as a "CB Radio"...just a tad on the illegal side for Uncle Charlie...

 

Jim Wilson designed a great antenna which I was using this morning to achieve this 45 mile barefoot trip this morning. Stereo headphones made it much easier to hear the weak signals.
This seems to be the best recording I ever did, due to the low volume level.

 

Dang that's real good! Not sure I could stand to use a headphone tho to listen to CB...maybe way out away from the city would be ok tho.

 

I had a blast, although the headphones kept falling out of my ears. I need to invest in a nicer pair. Here's a map of the trip. I guess I was wrong about 45 miles. after measuring, it was 37.5 as the crow flies.

 

45...37, still dang good for mobile to mobile...I've done that before on road trips, but usually it would be a night and away from any major city's when the noise floor was so quite it was hard to tell if the radio was even on or not...On my base-set up with the beam, that's not hard to do at all...but mobile to mobile to be that clear is amazing.

 

That's outstanding performance!

What power are these radios / amps rated at?

Do you think the antennas are at line-of-sight potential, or maybe the signals are getting through nearer the ground? (These are probably more rhetorical questions than actually answerable, but I always wonder about it, given the various theories about how things work.)

I tried using an earbud a while back but discovered my radio's external speaker port wasn't working. I would assume such devices would help compensate for the ambient din in the cabin by getting the speaker close to the eardrum.

 

The radio doing the recording on my end was the anytone at-6666 and the radio being recorded was a buddy of mine in a Kenworth W900 and His Radio was the Stryker 955 and he was using a Predator 10-K antenna and I was using a roof Mount Wilson 5000 antenna and when he got off at exit 107 he was down below line of sight and there were several mountains in between us as you can see in this terrain photo.
Neither one of us were using amplifiers.

 

Yeah I saw the terrain depiction. It, of course, doesn't show exactly how the two communicating antennas are placed relative to all the peaks at any given time, especially since both antennas are moving during the communications and the terrain in between changes accordingly.

Assuming the antennas are placed at the top of the left and right peaks respectively, then it seems they would have a problem maintaining a line-of-sight configuration just based on the display. But, of course, there probably are a lot of "dips" in the terrain between each of the peaks that might afford LOS path(s) at any given time.

The whole ground wave theory of RF transmission is interesting and befuddling at the same time, with its various line-of-sight, surface waves, space waves etc all fighting to get through the various conditions that prevail during the efforts to communicate.

Thanks for the info. You guys achieve distances that seem marvelous to me as a flat-lander. I can see why folks reading about such feats get frustrated and start wondering what they're doing wrong to miss out on what others are doing with their mobile equipment, especially if they are using factory-legal 4-watt radios. Unless, of course, our erratic and undependable friend "Skip" shows up.