Originally Posted by highoctane

I recently picked up a 102" steel whip antenna from Radio Shack since I broke the last to Firestick and Firefly antennas I had. Initially SWR was off the scale over 3.0. I pretty much new I had a bad coax cable at that point. I went back and picked up a stronger mount(for the longer antenna) and a new 20ft coax from Radio Shack. I wanted to get an 18ft but they had only 12 and 20. I did not coil up the extra tightly, but wound it in a very long oval up the aft end of the roll bar. The entire cable is run down under the roll bar padding, the length of the roll bar, back to the factory sub, then out under the tail gate seal. No sharp bends or kinks. My radio is a cheap Cobra 19 Ultra III that had a 1.3SWR with my 4ft firestick.


Here is how the antenna is mounted.







Afetr doing all this, I retested and my SWR is at 2.1 on ch.1, 2.0 on ch.20, and 1.9 on ch.40. I do not want to trim the antenna to tune SWR, since the instructions say not to, and I was told my the local cb shop not to cut a steel whip antenna, only fiberglass. What else can I do to lower the SWR? Is the receive and transmit range drastically effected by having a 2.0 swr compared to a 1.0-1.5ish SWR?

Originally Posted by NQ3X

I say again: SWR of 3:1 or lower is JUST FINE. Modern radios have power-reduction circuitry built in to automatically reduce power when SWR climbs above a certain point, usually 3:1.

There's too much obsession with SWR on these boards.

Bob