OK so I hooked up my cobra 29LX and Firestik 2 tunable tip antenna (grounded directly to the frame)..... I hear ppl just fine but I don't think anyone hears me.... I just wanna make sure my radio works but I have no idea how since nobody will ever answer me back.... Does that mean that nobody can hear me?

 

Do you have an SWR meter? You may not be transmitting well (and other factors). There are a number of good posts regarding this topic in the CB and Ham pages.

 

Try taking a short drive down the highway on channel 19, wait for a brief quite moment, then call out for a radio check

I had a similar problem when I first installed mine - there was tons of chatter, too much chatter really... so when I called for a check it was hard to tell if they couldn't hear me, if someone else had talked over me, or if they were just too involved in their conversation to care to comeback. So thats when I took a short drive down the highway and was finally able to confirm.

Shortly after that though I remembered that I still owned a small handheld CB, lol - all I really had to do was have my wife run into the opposite end of the house with it and check it that way

 

The radio has swr meter on it and I'm one bar above 2...The guy from cobra electronics said that was fine.... And for some reason all I hear is Spanish on channel 9 and 19.....thought they were emergency channels

 

Channel 19 is the original "trucker channel", not really for emergency. Back when CB's were the talk of the town, all truckers went to channel 19 to talk and hear communications....

 

9 is for emergencies, 19 is the standard go to trucker/highway channel; I hear some really wierd stuff on a few of the channels where I live; though 9 is always quiet and 19 seems to be filled with typical expected chatter.

 

I got an answer on 19!

Thanx everybody!

 

Generally speaking, an SWR level above 2 is not great. Optimally you want to be as low as possible. As an example, on ch.1 I get a 1.4, on channel 19 I get a 1.5 and channel 40 I get a 1.7. I use a stand-alone SWr meter, I've heard from people here that the integral SWRmeters are not accurate.

 

I once had a guy be so convinced that factory meters are junk that when his stand alone meter matched my built in, he went inside to borrow a meter from the other repair tech. When it matched the two previous readings he said there was probably a ground problem or it was a bad anntena and I needed to move it off the trunk lid so it would ground directly into the body before he could properly test it. I never returned.

 

... and a vote for the integral SWR meter... There ya go!