I'm guessing that both signals you hear are strong, including the garbled signal so the rf gain is having no impact.

Even garbled signals can be very strong. He man be slightly off frequency or perhaps is significantly overdriving amplification stages in his radio (common in CB) causing a distorted, clipping signal.

 

Could it possibly be a grounding issue? When I had it wounded to my bumper it was directly mounted to steel and everything was ok but my antenna was too short. Since I moved it to the tire carrier it is attached directly to the aluminum carrier with an aluminum antenna mount.

 

RF grounding is vital to radio performance, but I don't know how that would impact the RF receive gain function in the radio if everything else seemed fine.

If the grounding was a problem, overall receive and transmit SWR would likely appear poor.

 

Well then I don't know what's going on because it was fine until I moved the antenna and now it doesn't work.

 

Move it back?? Or double check all your connections.
If you had it working and just weren't getting traffic odds are is because there was none. What is your intended use for it?
I ran mine on scan for days and only ever picked up Spanish speakers in Texas/Mexico on channel 9??? I'm in PA! But once I got close to a highway I picked up a few other conversations. Along with some different west coast skip on 21 I think it was. I turn it in daily but rarely hear anything unless I'm near the trails. Which is all I need it for anyway.

 

I really have no intended use for it other than the fact that I wanted it. I live right off of the interstate and I work ten miles down the interstate and I was getting some traffic before but now I get nothing. I drive a truck for a living and in the truck i hear people all night and our yard is about a 1/4 mike from a truck stop and I can't hear anything from my jeep. When I had it mounted on the front bumper I couldn't even hear the truck stop from the yard even though I can see it. All my connections are fine, I've been over them a few times. I feel like it all had to do with my antenna placement or something.

 

Stupid question but is the mike connected? I was surprised to find that on my typical CB you had to have the mike attached in order to receive... yes sounds a little odd, even if you're not transmitting, maybe the receive signal is passed through the mike connector? No idea, haven't looked at the schematics, but all I know is that when I attached the mike, the receiver came to life.

Just a thought.

 

On receive, moving the antenna from one location to the other isn't likely to make or break the signal, as long as you have set your squelch right on the threshold between noise vs quiet. The differences will be pretty subtle.