Mobile Building up Little will antennas instead of buying new? Waste or improving?

[w9cll]

Yes you still need to bond. When I ran 11 meters I always used a full 1/4 whip bumper mounted. Honestly I don't remember having any issues. Good luck on whatever you choose.

 

[M0GVZ]

My radios are tuned and still have the limiters

Irrelevant. You can make amateur radio gear a splattery crapbox even using just a few watts if you have the mic gain and compression too high.

But when I asked for ideas and advice on how to do it on her car, No one said really anything useful. Asked a local "shop" and they said the idea I have would just create a dipole effect and wouldn't work to well.

OK I'll put some context into things....

Now we've got that out of the way, maybe you'll accept I have a bit of a clue. Your local shop doesn't know WTF they're talking about. Plain and simple.

What I was thinking is mount a 2ft. firestik to the useless cargo rack at a 45* angle back or equivalent, Then run two 10 ga. wires in opposite directions to the mounting bolts for body ground.

So you're going to take an antenna that on the most efficient ground ever only has around 30-40% of the efficiency of a 6ft antenna. So that means that both transmitted AND RECEIVED signals are only going to be a third of the strength that a 6ft antenna would be.

The cargo rack won't make a decent RF ground. The RF ground will only be the horizontal sections of the bar. It won't be the roof or the vehicle body no matter how many wires you run. Also talking about wire, RF flows over the surface of a conductor not through it. Flattened RG213 braid would be far better and to get the efficiency of conductivity of RG213 you'd have to use 0000ga wire as that is the only gauge that has the same surface area.

While it is only 2 ft in physical length, the electrical length is what really matters.....kind of.

But you don't have the electrical length. The manufacturers are lying to you, it isn't as electrically long as a 1/4 wave, half wave or 5/8 wave or whatever they claim it is. What it has is a coil that both matches the feedpoint to 50Ohms and turns most of the power you're throwing into the antenna into heat.

Not alot of options with this vehicle. Despite the physical length though, All FS antennas are 5/8th wave which is about 22 ft. of wire and top loaded.

NO THEY ARE NOT. Christ what I would give to visit your house with a field strength meter and a 6ft antenna to batter some sense into you.

Wattage amounts are almost ballpark over 100 really but for what I can get a single transistor box for new, I can get a good used 2 and have that slight bit extra. I've already decided against rebuilding these antennas. To old and not worth it in the end. Not for what I need them for shortly. Again, I'm open to ideas on how to had mount an antenna to her car without drilling any holes in the body. And thanks for the informative reply.

None that will work worth a shit other than the above option of a lip mount. Your rack mount and magmount ideas are going to end up in tears and that feeling of "if only I'd listened I'd not have set fire to my money" on both transmit and receive.

At best with the amp people will be able to hear her 10/20 miles away but like my friend she won't really be able to hear anyone more than 2/3 miles down the highway making the amp completely pointless and there is absolutely nothing you can do that will change that with what you intend to do.

Go ahead and install it and when it isn't working as you thought and your wife is saying that it works like crap and she has all kinds of issues with the car please feel free to look back at this thread where all the answers to the reasons why and what to do to sort it have been posted by multiple people.

 

[338_MtRushmore]

There is no free lunch, so just install whatever you can. If you want better performance later you will have to decide what its worth to you.

Who knows, maybe some day you will enjoy sinking a step drill into sheetmetal. I know I do