mcsjk

Due to my tire carrier being slanted (follows lines of Trektop), I won't be able to run my coax cable through any of the holes in the tailgate.

I am curious if running it through the bottom of the tailgate where it closes or through the side where it closes, would cause any serious pinching and/ or damage to the coax cable or my SWR reading?

Mark Doiron

That's an excellent question that a lot of people don't think to ask when wiring up their CB antennas. I've seen two installs where the cable at the tailgate got pinched, causing high VSWR. In one case, the pinch was so bad that the coax was starting to break. In the other, it wasn't obvious unless you felt the coax. Then you could feel the internal damage. In both cases the radios stopped working during trail runs--one to Moab, the other to Arkansas. It is a pain when your CB doesn't work, so you definitely want high confidence that your workmanship is good.

Anyway, the rule of thumb I learned in USAF (27-1/2 years of avionics maintenance) was bend coax no tighter than nine times its radius. I've seen a chart that is slightly different and allows a bit tighter bend. But, regardless, do something to prevent it from bending too tight. On my install (which uses the now empty third brake light wiring hole on the tailgate), I strapped the coax to the outer bend radios of the wire slack loop in the hinge area. It's been like that for over seven years and never had a problem. I also, BTW, built my own cable using the highest quality coax I could find, rather than opting for some pre-fabbed, Chinese-made import of unknown quality.

When a friend of mine wanted to wire to his tire swinggate, rather than go through the tailgate area, we dropped the cable down through the hole that is below the passenger rear taillight assembly (crawl under and look up). On early years, there's just foam there (unless it's fallen out, which is very likely). On later years there is a triangular plastic panel there. We drilled a hole through his, put a rubber grommet in it, ran the cable through, then sealed it with RTV. If you pull the taillight assembly out, you'll have more access to work in that area. We then brought the cable up behind the bumper and out the swinggate at its hinge point, being careful how tight that radius became as the gate was opened and closed.

jchappies

I run my CB cable the same way as Mark ^^, I also make my own cable. Like mark also said I run my HAM radio cable through the tail light but for me instead of coming up through the bottom I just notched the bottom of the plastic tail light and ran it into that cavity and then into the cab area.