Hello All,
I have a question that I am sure many of you will have useful suggestions for.
I am very new to playing with radios, I am booked to take my Amateur course (foundation level) in the New Year but in the interim, I have bought a cheap 11m CB transceiver off EBay to give myself the opportunity to play with antennae and a VSWR meter. I know there seem to be disparaging comments directed at CB and vice versa but it seemed like a simple and legal way to have a go.
Anyway, I intend to install an antenna on my car but as I am going to have strip the headlining out to do it, I want to make sure I use a suitable mount and feeder to enable me to switch to 2m/70cm in due course without too much more work.
A lot of the mounts seem to use a SO239 coupling to the antenna, which I thought posed a problem of inconsistent impedance, causing high VSWR at UHF frequencies (something I would like to avoid for obvious reasons). I have read about NMO mounts, but haven't seen much in the UK online Amateur shops with that style of mount and I don't know how difficult it would be to convert to SO239 for a CB aerial for the intervening period.
What would you recommend I do/use? Should I just put one mount in now and change it later?
I hope I haven't offended anyone by mentioning CB here but I thought it would probably be more productive than asking my question in the CB forum. I meant to take the Amateur exam years ago, I revised for it back in 2002 and was passing all the online tests I could find with decent scores but didn't do it quickly enough when I moved back to the UK, so I have to go through the three different classes sequentially now (hence the procrastination)!
Thank you,
Andrew
I have a question that I am sure many of you will have useful suggestions for.
I am very new to playing with radios, I am booked to take my Amateur course (foundation level) in the New Year but in the interim, I have bought a cheap 11m CB transceiver off EBay to give myself the opportunity to play with antennae and a VSWR meter. I know there seem to be disparaging comments directed at CB and vice versa but it seemed like a simple and legal way to have a go.
Anyway, I intend to install an antenna on my car but as I am going to have strip the headlining out to do it, I want to make sure I use a suitable mount and feeder to enable me to switch to 2m/70cm in due course without too much more work.
A lot of the mounts seem to use a SO239 coupling to the antenna, which I thought posed a problem of inconsistent impedance, causing high VSWR at UHF frequencies (something I would like to avoid for obvious reasons). I have read about NMO mounts, but haven't seen much in the UK online Amateur shops with that style of mount and I don't know how difficult it would be to convert to SO239 for a CB aerial for the intervening period.
What would you recommend I do/use? Should I just put one mount in now and change it later?
I hope I haven't offended anyone by mentioning CB here but I thought it would probably be more productive than asking my question in the CB forum. I meant to take the Amateur exam years ago, I revised for it back in 2002 and was passing all the online tests I could find with decent scores but didn't do it quickly enough when I moved back to the UK, so I have to go through the three different classes sequentially now (hence the procrastination)!
Thank you,
Andrew