Not Putting out enough

I would think so if the propagation (white noise is low) like at night or early morning . Sometimes during daylight hours when the skip is rollin' you can't talk much over a mile even w/ lots of POWER !

 

If you have a short ant. you want talk or hear very far, I have a short astatic ant. on my dodge and a Wilson 2000 on my mack truck and with the same radio i can hear and talk easy six miles on wilson2000 ant and a mile at best on astatic ant. Of course thats with a SWR of 1.5 or less on both setups.

 

Just a note, a 1/4 wave antenna for cb is about 9' long. All other antennas are electrically shortened to act like a 1/4 wave in a shorter length. It's a trade-off between performance & practicality.

Another note, if it's showing only 2 watts, I'd suspect the meter might not be accurate or your not giving it over 12.5 volts.

What is hi on 40?
Isn't there a set screw or two to loosen so you can vary the whip length?

 

A true power reading can only been made by a good calibrated watt meter such as Bird wattmeter and transmitting into a dummy load , a true 50 ohm termination. A good cb will key at 2-3 watts and modulate up to 4-6 watts when you talk. by FCC rules a cb tramsmitter from the manufacturer can only transmit up to 4 watts at peak when you modulate (talk). This isnt bad however since alot about being "heard" is actually in the audio quality, if a transmitter keys up at 2 watts but modulates up to 4 or 5 watts this tells me that this has a superb audio quality. I wouldask people how your audio quality is before I worry about the 2 watts. If your swr is good to the antenna than more than likely you will be fine. As far as you talk is as good as the person you are talking too's radio set up and antenna. Flat land you may talk 30 miles, trees buildings and hills maybe 5 miles. All depends.