Cannot get my cb radio tuned

[DK327]

I've got the power for my Bearcat 980 SSB directly connected to vehicle battery using the grommet that's under the driver floor mat, running under the vehicle to the battery terminals. The antenna I'm using is magnet mount Sirio Turbo 800 Blue PL. The magnet base of the antenna is from Wilson 1000. The antenna wire runs across the roof of vehicle into the rear hatch, then under the cargo mat to center console, attached to my antenna tuner then to SWR/power meter then to CB radio via right side of driver seat. I don't trust the SWR/power meter of the radio to be very accurate so I'm using an external SWR/power meter.

I've used 3 CB radios so far with same setup and have not had any issues with horn or flashers or any other anomalies. I've run anywhere from 5W to 100W (to test a friend's 10 meter amp before purchasing to make sure it was operational) with zero issues. My SWR is 1:1 midband and 1.5:1 at the edges (ch1 and 40) with only a 3-foot mag mount antenna.

 

[kolelt]

I will try and hook it directly to battery. But re routing the antenna cable ? I wouldn't know where to ? I'm using [MENTION=98153]MStudt[/MENTION] cb antenna mount. Basically a lot of people use it. With fire stick antenna. Again many use it. Basically a lot of people have my set up.

I can only go for a cb that fits in the ash tray. I already use the bottom area under the headunit for rocker switches

 

[kolelt]

I think I have figured out the issue. Went to a local cb/ham radio store. Love those kinda stores. Old school ! The guy hooked up some meter to the cb. He said the frequency coming to me was very very high. Not sure the proper terminology. We turned down my tip on the fire stick. And it seem to have fixed the issue. I assume maybe from off roading and hitting branches, vibration have caused the tip to losen and be not tuned. Some will keep and eye and hopefully I'm good. Wanted to share this incase anyone else has this issue.

 

[DK327]

I think I have figured out the issue. Went to a local cb/ham radio store. Love those kinda stores. Old school ! The guy hooked up some meter to the cb. He said the frequency coming to me was very very high. Not sure the proper terminology. We turned down my tip on the fire stick. And it seem to have fixed the issue. I assume maybe from off roading and hitting branches, vibration have caused the tip to losen and be not tuned. Some will keep and eye and hopefully I'm good. Wanted to share this incase anyone else has this issue.

Does your Firestik antenna have the rubber tip? That should prevent the branches from coming in contact with the tuning element and de-tune the antenna unintentionally. It also prevents rust/corrosion. If you don't have the rubber tip and end up getting one, when you put it on the antenna, you will have to re-tune the antenna because it WILL change your SWR reading and make it high again.

If you do have the rubber tip, I hope the CB Shop checked the levels WITH THE RUBBER TIP ON THE ANTENNA.

I'm glad you were able to solve the issue. From what you described, it seems like the antenna was too long and you were operating the radio with high SWR. This is why I use an external SWR/power meter between the radio and antenna (and have an antenna tuner too) because it might show you have acceptable SWR according to your radio's internal meter but these are notorious for being inaccurate.

Man, that radio's been thru a lot! Transmitting without an antenna, operating with high SWR... All this shortens the life of internal components greatly. Did the CB Shop check to see how many watts your setup is outputting?

Anyway, if you want the maximum performance, nothing can match an antenna placed at the highest point on the truck and in the center. I know you have a roof rack which prevents this so in your case, you have no choice but to opt for convenience at the cost of performance. I switch to your type of setup when traveling for vacation and have my Yakima cargo box on the roof.

 

[Ron Burgandy]

has anybody had success with replacing the stock antenna with a CB antenna? i realize some creative mounting is in store. I'm looking at replacing my broken powered antenna with a 2' firestik, using it with a splitter for FM radio as well.


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[DK327]

has anybody had success with replacing the stock antenna with a CB antenna? i realize some creative mounting is in store. I'm looking at replacing my broken powered antenna with a 2' firestik, using it with a splitter for FM radio as well.


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IMO use the pre-existing rear antenna for FM instead of messing with a splitter. Also, a 2' CB antenna will be inefficient and have a VERY narrow bandwidth, yielding acceptable SWR across maybe 10 channels tops and start getting very high SWR at the edges of the CB band which is bad. I wouldn't go with anything lower than a 3-foot antenna (without an antenna tuner) which is barely tall enough for the entire CB band.

 

[Dezert4Runner]

I think I have figured out the issue. Went to a local cb/ham radio store. Love those kinda stores. Old school ! The guy hooked up some meter to the cb. He said the frequency coming to me was very very high. Not sure the proper terminology. We turned down my tip on the fire stick. And it seem to have fixed the issue. I assume maybe from off roading and hitting branches, vibration have caused the tip to losen and be not tuned. Some will keep and eye and hopefully I'm good. Wanted to share this incase anyone else has this issue.

Seems like that would fix your swr reading but I can't imagine that your swr alone was causing the horn issue. The horn doesn't go off now after fixing the antenna length?

Does your Firestik antenna have the rubber tip? That should prevent the branches from coming in contact with the tuning element and de-tune the antenna unintentionally. It also prevents rust/corrosion. If you don't have the rubber tip and end up getting one, when you put it on the antenna, you will have to re-tune the antenna because it WILL change your SWR reading and make it high again.

If you do have the rubber tip, I hope the CB Shop checked the levels WITH THE RUBBER TIP ON THE ANTENNA.

I'm glad you were able to solve the issue. From what you described, it seems like the antenna was too long and you were operating the radio with high SWR. This is why I use an external SWR/power meter between the radio and antenna (and have an antenna tuner too) because it might show you have acceptable SWR according to your radio's internal meter but these are notorious for being inaccurate.

The Firefly tuning instructions show to tune it with the rubber cap on, so I would assume that was done when initially trying to tune it. I just replaced my tunable tip this week due to bad rust and I always had that cap on since day one after tuning it a little over a year ago. I never ran the antenna through a car wash either, always removed it to prevent damage. It's like the brass was just a coating that wore off and allowed it to rust. I do live < a mile from the beach though...

 

[kolelt]

I do have the rubber boot. Something happened that it lost the tune. So he hooked up this tester. Didn't even have to have the cb radio on. He was like wow it's reading high. Told me to remove the rubber boot and turn down the tip. Basically it needed to be down all the way. He said it is reading good. Put the boot back on. No more blinkers indicators flashing when talking into the mic. And no more horn beep.

I did see someone on here post a photo of them running a cb antenna where the radio mounts. But due to photobucket messing everything up. It is probably long gone.

 

[kolelt]

Does your Firestik antenna have the rubber tip? That should prevent the branches from coming in contact with the tuning element and de-tune the antenna unintentionally. It also prevents rust/corrosion. If you don't have the rubber tip and end up getting one, when you put it on the antenna, you will have to re-tune the antenna because it WILL change your SWR reading and make it high again.

If you do have the rubber tip, I hope the CB Shop checked the levels WITH THE RUBBER TIP ON THE ANTENNA.

I'm glad you were able to solve the issue. From what you described, it seems like the antenna was too long and you were operating the radio with high SWR. This is why I use an external SWR/power meter between the radio and antenna (and have an antenna tuner too) because it might show you have acceptable SWR according to your radio's internal meter but these are notorious for being inaccurate.

Man, that radio's been thru a lot! Transmitting without an antenna, operating with high SWR... All this shortens the life of internal components greatly. Did the CB Shop check to see how many watts your setup is outputting?

Anyway, if you want the maximum performance, nothing can match an antenna placed at the highest point on the truck and in the center. I know you have a roof rack which prevents this so in your case, you have no choice but to opt for convenience at the cost of performance. I switch to your type of setup when traveling for vacation and have my Yakima cargo box on the roof.

Yeah he set it up. I don't remember his terminology correctly. But from what I understood is that it was bad. And it seems that could have easily caused my horn to go of and blinkers flash when transmitting.

Everytime I would transmit. Horn would beep and flashers flash on odometer. Now it doesn't.

 

[DK327]

He probably used an antenna analyzer which shows what frequency your antenna is tuned to. If he said to turn the tip down, the antenna was probably tuned to resonate below the CB band, at a lower frequency. As the whip gets shorter, it resonates at a higher frequency.

Anyway, glad you got to the bottom of it! It's kind of strange that a de-tuned antenna would cause the issues you've described. As for the cap for the antenna, when you put the cap back on AFTER tuning the antenna, this probably changed your SWR levels, but apparently not enough to cause the blinker/horn issue.

 

[kolelt]

He probably used an antenna analyzer which shows what frequency your antenna is tuned to. If he said to turn the tip down, the antenna was probably tuned to resonate below the CB band, at a lower frequency. As the whip gets shorter, it resonates at a higher frequency.

Anyway, glad you got to the bottom of it! It's kind of strange that a de-tuned antenna would cause the issues you've described. As for the cap for the antenna, when you put the cap back on AFTER tuning the antenna, this probably changed your SWR levels, but apparently not enough to cause the blinker/horn issue.

You think putting it back on changes it dramatically ? I'm going back to the store tomorrow to pick up a cb set up for my friend. Who originally criticized me for getting cb. Then when we went off roading. I had 2 hand held cobra radios. And after that , he wants to get a CB because of how convenient and easy it is to communicate on trails. So I'll ask the guy more and maybe run few more tests. But I really think the issue is fixed.

Curious though. Could the cb radio in our trucks communicate with the hand held radios ? Like the ones you can get from Walmart ? I got two "cobra" ones 32 mile range. As a emergency kit incase me or a passenger would have to walk and seek help.

 

[DK327]

You think putting it back on changes it dramatically ? I'm going back to the store tomorrow to pick up a cb set up for my friend. Who originally criticized me for getting cb. Then when we went off roading. I had 2 hand held cobra radios. And after that , he wants to get a CB because of how convenient and easy it is to communicate on trails. So I'll ask the guy more and maybe run few more tests. But I really think the issue is fixed.

Curious though. Could the cb radio in our trucks communicate with the hand held radios ? Like the ones you can get from Walmart ? I got two "cobra" ones 32 mile range. As a emergency kit incase me or a passenger would have to walk and seek help.

I would ask the guy at CB Shop to test the antenna with the cap on to see if it made any difference. I don't think it would be that dramatic but that depends on your tolerance. For instance, with a 1:1 (perfect) SWR you're transmitting at 100% efficiency. If your radio is outputting 4W the antenna is transmitting all of that 4W. If your SWR is off a little, say 1.5:1 now you're at 95% efficiency and transmitting 3.8W and reflecting 0.2W back to the radio.

Since your antenna was tuned to way below CB band, I imagine the SWR was somewhere around 4:1 or even 5:1 (or more) at which point you're losing 35%-45% of your output power and antenna is only transmitting 2.5W out of possible 4W and reflecting the rest back to the radio which puts strain on radio's internal components and apparently causes other electronics inside the vehicle to malfunction.

This is why it's important to tune the antenna by getting an external SWR meter so you know how low or high the SWR is when you're transmitting.

As for the Cobra with 30 mile range, those are probably FRS/GMRS radios that operate on UHF frequencies. Our CB's are around 27MHz while FRS is 462/467MHz so CB and FRS radios will not be able to talk to each other.

FRS is great for short range comms (trails) and it has much less power 0.5W if I remember correctly. CB has 4-5W and can comm longer distances. Oh and dont buy into that 30 mile range crap, that's in perfect weather conditions with nothing in between 2 radios like over a pond or something and you MIGHT get that range but in normal everyday conditions I doubt you'd even get 3 miles, more like 0.3 miles...

We use FRS radio here at work and even have trouble communicating when someone's on 1 side of the building and I'm on the other. The walls and steel beams between the two radios degrade the signal to the extreme. Same will happen with buildings and trees outdoors but on the trail where vehicles are close together or camping, it'll work great.

 

[kolelt]

I will ask him to hook up his tester again. Thanks for the help and information.

Out of curiosity. What would be the range of a cb radio ? Also on the cobra 19dxiv. Do you guys turn the RF gain all the way to the right. Then turn the SQL to the point where it eliminates that static noise ? Trying to understand the rf gain and squelch

 

[DK327]

I will ask him to hook up his tester again. Thanks for the help and information.



Out of curiosity. What would be the range of a cb radio ? Also on the cobra 19dxiv. Do you guys turn the RF gain all the way to the right. Then turn the SQL to the point where it eliminates that static noise ? Trying to understand the rf gain and squelch

RF Gain is the sensitivity of the radio. When its all the way up you'll hear distant stations and weak signals but it will also increase the background noise levels. I have my RF gain almost all the way down to make the radio less sensitive to interference from noise sources since I live in the city and noise pollution is terrible. When I'm camping or on highway away from the city I turn it almost all the way up to hear distant stations. Squelch is cutting out audio at certain noise level, anything above that level will let you hear the signal and once it drops below threshold set by squelch radio will be completely silent again. When RF gain is low, squelch will also cut audio at a lower setting vs when it's high, you have to also turn squelch up to compensate for higher noise level to be able to cut the audio.

The range will depend on lots of factors, terrain, your SWR level, antenna position, antenna length and the other person you're trying to reach. A quick rule of thumb is 1W is about 1 mile but that's probably true for a base station using a proper length antenna vs a mobile radio with a 3-foot antenna for example.

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[kolelt]

So before I was messing with the rf gain and squelch. When I turned down the squelch. I was able to hear someone talking but very very very staticky hard to understand. Once I turned up the squelch just pass the static noise. I could no longer here anything.

 

[DK327]

So before I was messing with the rf gain and squelch. When I turned down the squelch. I was able to hear someone talking but very very very staticky hard to understand. Once I turned up the squelch just pass the static noise. I could no longer here anything.

Yeah squelch will cut out the audio entirely until a strong signal is detected again. Its for those that don't want to constantly listen to background noise while no one's talking on the channel. Also if you have the radio in scan mode, squelch lets the radio keep scanning vs if it was off the radio would stay on that same channel and would not scan.


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[kolelt]

I was hearing someone talk. But it was such a weak signal that you couldn't understand. A lot of static. With squelch up it cut it off completely. So basically squelch allows a clean strong signal ?

 

[DK327]

I was hearing someone talk. But it was such a weak signal that you couldn't understand. A lot of static. With squelch up it cut it off completely. So basically squelch allows a clean strong signal ?

Yep and rejects the background noise and weak signals. If you have the radio in scan mode it lets you pass inactive channels and stop at active ones.


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[kolelt]

Yep and rejects the background noise and weak signals. If you have the radio in scan mode it lets you pass inactive channels and stop at active ones.


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Don't think my cobra cb has scan mode

 

[DK327]

Don't think my cobra cb has scan mode

You're right, I just checked and it seems it doesn't come with that mode from factory. When the shop checks your SWR with the antenna analyzer and antenna cap on, have them set the length of antenna to show lowest SWR mid band if possible so that you get acceptable SWR across the entire band. With a 3-foot antenna, you should be able to achieve at least a 1.5:1 midband and 2.5:1 at the edges. Anything over 3:1 would be inadvisable as at that point you're losing 25% of your 4 Watts and only transmitting 3 Watts, reflecting the rest back into the radio.