flash you are the man. i was having trouble with my swr in my mobile. 2.0 across the bands here in the uk. came across your video last night and did exactly as you said and BOOM swr dropped to 1.2. thanx for making the video it was a great watch. 73s from 26ct1808 south coast of England
Hey I'm glad it worked for you. I've seen people over cut antennas and ruin them trying to fix the SWR issue. This little trick works unless you have a sports car made out of plastic.
Thanks for the video,now I know what my problem is. My boss gave me a 510 Uniden and a new antenna so I can talk to the blacktop trucks as they come in and I tried to set the swr. The antenna has a collar on it to adjust and my meter would do exactly like yours everytime I touched the collar now I know what to do to fix it. I'm glad it wasn't the type of antenna that you cut pieces off to adjust or I would have ruined it. Perfect video.
Works great. I grounded it to one of the seat bolts and my problem went away. It also helped with interferance from my strobe light. Thanks for the help.
Thanks, I hadn't serviced my mobile radio in quite a few years and I had to make myself fix it. I've seen that issue drive people insane so I thought this video might help a few people that play with radio stuff too.
What you have there is 'common mode current'. One of the best ways to diagnose it is to move and grab the coax. I'd utilise a decent coaxial choke looped through an appropriate ferrite toroid/s. Then ground it on the radio side of the choke, sort of like you've done ( because you're running a mag mount). There will be no ill effects by running a correctly made choke. The problem with the amp is to do with rf feedback. Of coarse the cabin is going to be full of this when you up the power. I smoked an Astatic D104-M6B once when I was running a quarter wave droopy insulated from the mast in a portable situation. I mean smoke poured out of it as the plastic was melting behind the metal grill. Gave a nice tingle on the top lip too.
Yeah a common mode current is EXACTLY what it was and it can be corrected with chokes but if you can cure it with good grounding that's even better. There are many roads that lead to Rome when it comes to Voo-Doo electronic issues like this.
Luke if you touch the antenna it will have "BIG" effects on the SWR! What you are looking for is the following symptoms. (1) Touching the radio or the SWR meter (If you are using an external SWR meter) while you are keying up makes the SWR move. (2) Just adding an external SWR meter or a power meter changes the SWR. If that's the case you want to ground your coax midway somewhere in the truck because although your radio may be grounded you may still need an extra ground to kill the ground loop.
Laugh. I love how you display your unlawful amplifier. Owning it! Appreciate your being candid. 30 years ago they would be knocking on your door after seeing this video. :)
You have people that run mini sized freezer "splatter box" amps equal to or greater than the output power of some small AM broadcast radio stations in their houses and those are the ones who deserve a knock on the door. This tiny amp in the truck is not only clean from harmonics but I don't push it either. I have this in the truck because I am well into the boondocks (country) here and it pays off cutting through noise and being heard when I do get onto the highway. Whats crazy is in the UK they recently allowed their CB operators to now run AM so now they can run both AM and FM CB's but the kicker is they upped their legal power limit up to 100 watts. As to hiding this tiny amp, I'm just not pushing anything worth their trouble especially when you have people pushing sweet 16's amps in their cars and trucks.
I just put in a mobile and added a extra ground wire, plus i’m about to put up a base station with copper ran to a rod about 7ft 9inchs deep plus i got a 8 gauge ground wire I’m going to run to my house frame. I hope all this helps with performance and lighting strikes. Thanks for the 411
Get some copper wire and strip all of the insulation from it if it has any then rap it around the exposed copper braid on the coax followed with resealing the coax with electrical tape to protect it from damage. Be sure to leave about 6 inches length of the copper wire you added from the coax so that you can tie it to a solid ground on the truck like I did in this video. Now go and check the SWR. Hopefully this solved the issue. Let me know if this makes sense to you.
To check for RF ground loops key up the radio while watching the SWR meter and then lay your hand on the radio. Repeat this by running your hand up and down on the coax that is coming from the antenna. If the SWR moves you probably need to ground the coax midway to the truck's steel. You can carefully strip some of the outer plastic shielding from coax to expose the copper braid but DO NOT cut or damage it. Cont:
I meant to say this in my last reply. The collar moves up and down correct? You don't try to adjust it while keying the radio. What you do is look at channel 1 and channel 40. If the SWR is higher on 40 but decent on 1 the antenna is electrically too long and I think you would raise the collar to fool the antenna into thinking it's shorter. If the SWR looks OK on 1 but high on 40, you would lower the rings for the opposite effect. If it won't adjust then you have possible grounding issues Cont:
You should invest in a good lightning arrestor to install inline with your coax going to the antenna. It will protect your equipment and house if your antenna gets hit by lightning. Just be sure to ground it. I agree antennas must have a good ground plane in order to work correctly. I don't think the mag-mount is providing you with a good ground plane. The paint on vehicles sometimes messes with the grounding when using these types of mounts. A simple fix would be to lay a thin piece of sheet metal under the mount (not sure how your paint would hold up). Larsen mounts are great as long as they are attached to metal chassis of you vehicle (i.e. under the hood or trunk). Ceiling & Trunk mounts a that require holes to be drill are little more involved, sometimes you have to make a ground cable that extends from the coax connector to the chassis similar to what you showed. The vehicle chassis is essentially the ground plane for mobile mount antennas and if you don't have a good metal to metal contact you will have problem.
i wish i could thumbs up this video a million times i kept asking old timers about MY HIGH SWR they would say my connections or meter and shit gee whizz thanks FLASH gettibg a heater soon and had to fix this problem thanks
You should collect all of the youtube video links along with websites with this activity and contact the FCC along with all of the law enforcement agencies with this damming information.
OK... A ground loop is where you have a high enough resistance where the current from the RF or even current from a power source will have the tendency to move from it's intended paths into other paths that conduct. In other words, the RF from the coax will want to leak out and cause the coax itself to become part of the antenna and a simple workaround is to physically ground the coax to the vehicle which will help and in most cases stop the RF from splattering around in the vehicle . A common issue besides a poor SWR is the microphone can get hot in your hand from RF if you are in the range of 100+ watts plus this will make you sound muffled. All I did was put a splice in my coax near my seatbelt mount. I wrapped some braided wire around the splice barrel then I taped it to keep it in place. The wire was then bolted to the seatbelt mounting bolt. You have to keep the wire as short as possible when you do this. In other words you wouldn't want to have use foot of wire as a ground or it will become part of the issue too. I take my power directly from the battery so I had ground loops and I eliminated them by making tie points with the coax to the body of the vehicle . I hope this helps answer your question.
Almost forgot... The large base on the magnet mount has a very large capacitance so the RF can easily couple to the roof of the car. The capacitance (coupling effect) is good enough that the RF sees it as a direct connection or at the very least very close to it. Since this video I have made a mounting bracket that ties to the truck bed then goes to the triple magnet mount in the video. I am now using a 102 inch whip that mounts to the bracket. I may do a new video on this soon because this works with a very good SWR across a wide frequency span.
Grounding surely plays havoc, I get a problem sometimes with my SWR meter, when I go to set it FWD, the meter is eractic...Think that's a ground problem as well??
+Junior D It's possible. The best way to see if it is a grounding issue (Ground loop) is while keying the radio up grab the coax and run it thru your hand while you watch the SWR. If it moves around peel back about 1 inch of the outer plastic shield exposing the inner copper shield somewhere about halfway down the coax but be careful not to cut it or damage the inner copper shield.. Take some braided copper wire and wrap it around the copper shield then tape it to hold the copper wire you added and to protect where you stripped back the outer plastic lining being sure to use a long enough piece of wire to ground the cable with. Take the copper wire and ground it to the seat belt mounting bolt that holds it to the frame of even to a bolt that holds one of your seats to the frame of the car or truck and most of the time this will fix the issue unless you have a fiberglass body and the antenna itself isn't seeing a ground plane path. If that's the case you will have to get some aluminum duct tape and build a ground plane for the antenna. If you are driving a older car or a truck it won't have a fiberglass hood or roof.
Common your radio ground with the ground installed by your power company. Without that, the lightening can strike your antenna, and follow its way to the ground from your power company, killing everything in between.
The antenna was actually grounded at the coax at the antenna itself along with all of the steel guide wires that went into steel anchors that hold the guy wires but that wasn't enough ground. The antenna is now grounded in 5 places along the coax path with solid copper coated grounding rods including right before the coax goes to the radio itself and during a bad storm or if we are away there is a dummy wire that the coax can be screwed into to loop the wire in the house directly to a copper ground rod that is 5 feet into the ground directly under the radio. Problem handled.
@@flash001USA I don't know what all you just typed, it was simple, did you connect your radio ground to your homes power line ground, or not. You can have a thousand grounds on your radio, but it it does not connect to the power line ground of your home, it can lead to bad things when lightening strikes.
@@JosephMassimino In a house you have a hot along with a neutral and then you have an earth ground unless you're dealing with a very old house that only has a hot and neutral on the wall sockets. A lot of people aren't aware of this but the earth's ground used by the power company serves a couple of purposes one of them being to get rid of ground loops from the telephone pole to the house and I'm pretty sure you've probably noticed on most telephone poles where the transformer is there is almost always a heavy copper wire running down the side of the pole that goes to ground. Whenever you're grounding to the third prong on your AC wall socket, you should technically be going to a earth ground too and as long as the electrician that wired the house up did their job correctly then the third grounding prong on the AC receptacles in the house should all tie to the metal case of the fuse box which in turn finds itself to a earth ground. In some cases especially on older residential houses, earth ground will be shared with the neutral plug maybe because they didn't have a choice at the time for whatever the reasoning was. I wanted to make sure we were on the same page as far as how you and I describe ground. Since the lightning strike my antenna now has five earth grounds using copper grounding rods going five feet into the ground along the coax path. Yes the radio itself along with power supplies and other accessories use a 3 prong plug that take them to earth ground which is also tied to the metal fuse box case which also ties to the power company transformer on the pole. I always had that before I added all of the extra ground points on the coax cable leading into the house. The way I'm grounded is correct and safe with the only difference being now I have many grounding points along the RF coax cable path as a safety precaution. Hopefully that clears up what I was trying to relay it to you and sorry for any confusion.
@@flash001USA % foot ground rods in some states is going into dry earth. Here in Florida where the water table at some times of the years is at, or very close to the surface, my ground rods go down 10 feet, so they remain in wet soil at all times. I found the 5 foot ground rod used by the power company, and I pounded a 10 foot rod right next to it ,and clamped them together, while at the same time connecting it to my radio room, and tower ground system. I did not know that you lived in a very old house with no ground system to the power from the power company.
@@JosephMassimino Joe I live in a modern house but in the past (many years ago) I've lived in houses that only used the older two prong plugs. Thankfully here in SC the ground isn't bone dry and the last grounding rod under the house is in earth ground that is always damp due to no sun able to reach it so a 5 foot grounding rod will get the job done.
im gona try this on my jeep wrangler, i installed everything brand new ,new cb max rad antenna, its on a taillight bracket,trying to match it ,i cant get it under 2 on swr,ill keep you posted, thank you!!!
The main thing besides a few solid grounding points along the coax path is for the antenna to be able to interact with the body of the vehicle so that the antenna can develop a decent lobe. Good luck.
what could be wrong with wilson mobil antennas. i have tuned alot of mobil antennas and have gotten them way down in s. w. r. i have tried three different mobil wilson antennas in the same spot, same solid mount no magnets... and the best s. w. r. i have ever gotten was a 1.5. on all three wilson mobil antennas. i ground the things in multiple places, no good. i put a firestick or hustler on the same mount and my s. w. r. is about perfect. ?????
When it comes to antennas sometimes only the shadow knows. It also depends on the vehicle along with the location of the antenna too. I have always had issues with the center loaded antennas like the hustler where other people had great SWR with them and recently I tried out a firestick and I fought to get a good SWR on it. I have had the best luck with antennas that have the loading coil at the bottom or the base of the antenna. I've never tried out a Wilson antenna but I do know people have had great results with those as well.
I have a Ford Ranger truck and I've used a Wilson 2000 and a Procomm quad wrap antennas. I tried 2 brand new different ant mounts with brand new coax and my swr runs 1.5. I have a Texas Star 250 with a 3 foot jumper. When I use the amp, my swr goes up to 2 or above. Any help would be appreciated.
It's definitely an RF ground Loop issue. I had the same problem with my truck. A lot of people see that same issue when they run a little bit of power. Try the following and you may be pretty amazed at how well this helps. Figure out where you can add some ground tap points along the floor in the vehicle so that you can ground the coax coming from the antenna to the chassis of the body of the vehicle. Do it where the wire comes in to the vehicle and do it somewhere near where the antenna cable will hook into the radio. All you have to do is strip a little bit of the coax plastic coating back without damaging the copper braid or the actual antenna wire and rap you a little bit of soft braided copper wire around it so that you have a ground point on the actual coax cable itself then tape it up so that it's sealed from any kind of dampness or anything else that can get in there and corrode the coax wire.. Once you do that ground the wire that you added to the coax cable to the metal chassis on the vehicle which could be anywhere along the floor or near a seat where there may be a bolt you can tie the wire to without the need for drilling holes unless you just have to. Two things to mention here. You don't need to strip back but maybe a quarter of an inch of plastic off the coax and the second thing is keep your newly added grounding wires as physically short as you can to wherever the ground point is on the chassis. You'll be amazed how much of a difference this will make. Your problem sounds identical to what I had with my truck. Let me know how it turns out.
You want to ground it midway in the vehicle before it screws into the back of the radio. You could cut the coax and add a splice barrel and wrap braid around the splice barrel and either use a small hose clamp to make sure the braided wire is touching the splice barrel with a solid contact or you could just wrap braid around it and tape it as tight as possible to accomplish the same thing. If someone didn't want to add a splice barrel then the idea I mentioned with stripping back some plastic shield from the coax to expose the outer copper braided shield is also a valid "second choice" option.
great video i have a question. my base station as an SWR meter built into it. my SWR are 1.2 BUT when i add an external watt / swr meter the SWR meter in the radio goes high like 2.5 but the SWR on the external meter is 1.2 . i have changed jumpers and even tried a different external meter but get the same results. get you give me some insight on this please. thanks !! and 73s
Is the radio grounded in the house? I don't mean by the ground jack on the wall socket. I've seen this before and just like the mobile it always turns out to be an RF loop issue. Sometimes you can go under the house or the room where the radio is and put a ground rod deep into the ground then you put a splice barrel in the cable BEFORE it comes in the house where you make sure the barrel is physically attached to the grounding rod. Be sure to seal the barrel connector and the coax from any kind of moisture or water from seeping in. A second trick would to do the same thing I mentioned and add a 1 foot loop out of 10 or 12 feet of coax that you tie together with nylon ties to keep it together. Lay this on the ground under the house then feed the other end to the splice barrel on the grounding rod and this not only gives you some lightning protection but it will remove most if not ALL stray RF. I'm running an IMAX 2000 and my SWR is as stable as it gets with any decent meter I have inline plus the radio's SWR meter follows the external meter. I hope this helps.
flash001USA there is no ground on the radio plug. i found that very odd but seems to be the normal for these old units? The antenna has 2 - ten foot ground rods with 8 gauge copper right to the antenna U bolts
No problem about not having a place to hook a ground up to either the radio or the amp. You can just take some stripped copper wire and run a few turns around the coax connector on the back of the radio and hook your ground wire to that or if you grounded under the house you don't have to mess with any of that because the coax will be grounded before it even comes up to the radio and amp. If you have an antenna on the side of your house make sure that it's grounded outside. The more grounds you have the better everything will function. The trick I mentioned about a 1-foot loop of wire with about 10 or 12 turns on it under the house laid on the ground actually works. People do that in cars that don't have a lot of Steel so that they can get the ground plane they need but it really does work with the application that I'm talking about. Trust me when I tell you it'll be like you're talking on a completely different radio that's how much of a better of a performance you'll see from it. Been there done that.
It sounds like you have the antenna grounding covered but as far as the radio or the amp goes that's simple enough to ground. Just ground to the radio or the amp's chassis or strip some copper wire and wrap a few loops of copper wire around the RF connector to hook a ground wire to. The method I mentioned in the 1st reply will make a BIG difference in the performance of your radio to the point it will be a completely different setup in the way it performs and if you ground the coax under the house you can avoid running more wires to the radio.
flash001USA thanks again I will give that a try. I live In Florida so there is no " under the house " but I understand what your explaining. So the radio swr and meter swr should match ? One at a time they both read the same BUT in line the radio reads high swr. I was told it's not really an issue as long as the external meter is reading low SWR. it just doesnt seem right to me.
There is very little change with the radios SWR meter when the external meter is removed. Since this video I invested into a high end self powered SWR meter that doesn't require a radio and it sweeps whatever bandwidth or single channel you choose and it was a good investment. It also confirmed what I was demonstrating at the time of this video so that was a good thing.
So when setting my swr the meter is maxing out cant get it to drop down any I have ohm out everything and still cant find anything wrong do u think grounding out the coax will help I have been at it for days and cant figure anything out also inam running a dual setup
Yeah, it's worth a try because you can have everything technically correct but RF can pull voodoo magic havoc and you can easily misdiagnose and chase an issue that turns out to be something totally unexpected such as a RF return or grounding issue. Hopefully you aren't dealing with a vehicle that has a fiberglass body because that requires a few special mods to make it work correctly. Let me know how it turns out for you.
@@flash001USA sorry I haven't got back to u been busy I took it to my local cb shop and had them test the swr he said I was around 2.5 then I did the ground like in your video and haven't been back up yet to check it but from talking to a few ppl since the ground installing I am getting much clearer transmitting will let u know more when he gets done tuning my other cb
Above, the capacitor A is dead to ground so no rf voltage there. Only capacitor B can be seen in the lower drawing. And those 2 balls are not seen in the lower drawing either. Is that a mark 2 or sometin ?
Got a problem maybe you can help with. I have a Falcon made Dipole Antenna pre tuned for 11m and my SWR no matter what I do is 2.5 or 3.. I don't know what I'm doing wrong I've got 18' of new coax and insulators and all. Got any tips?
I had already been testing before I started recording the video so I knew where the SWR stood before I started the video. Yeah I set the meter beforehand and the changes didn't change that much switching between the bands.
@@petersannicolas8949 Yeah, the way I did this was to tune the antenna for the lowest SWR on Ch 20 and to calibrate to Ch 20 on the regular CB bands. I repeated testing the SWR on the bands including calibrating the SWR meters before I even started recording the video just to make sure that everything was reasonably accurate. There wasn't enough of a difference between the band calibrations so what I did here was to do the calibrations on the standard CB band instead. The difference in calibrating even between Ch 1 and Ch 40 really didn't make enough difference to calibrate and even jumping out of band the difference was very little. I should have mentioned that in the video but I didn't so I can see where someone would have questions. Thanks for the feedback.
You're correct. Originally the antenna wasn't grounded well enough and then I tied the coax into the vehicle body and got a good solid ground at which point the antenna issues completely straightened up. Most magnetic mount antennas couple through capacitance to the body of the vehicle and sometimes this is more than enough especially with older full size vehicles with larger roofs or trunk lids but with these little trucks, it can be hit and miss. I made this video quite a few years ago and the grounding fix I made is still holding up to this day. Something else is these small trucks don't really offer a good ground plane on the top of their roofs and you'll see people choose to either mount an antenna to the back bumper with a 102 inch stainless steel whip which I did for a while or even mount the antenna inside of the truck bed but I didn't want to do that. The only reason I decided to get away from the 102 steel whip is because I wanted a different lobe pattern. What I have now has decent ears in front of the truck and in back of the truck along with a well behaved SWR low or high power.
A larger or additional magnet on the mount might also help? Interesting on your wire, curious, how long, is it multiple 1/4 waves? Also, a ground wire right at the radio could also add more ground plane effect? A single magnet on the mount can handle just the radio but needs help as the wattage goes up. A very interesting video enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing !!!
Rocko jekins Is that what you are trying to set up? If the antenna was designed with radials it probably won't tune without them. The coax along with the pole will act somewhat as a radial but it won't work good because it won't be at the right wavelength so the tuning will be hit and miss with you.
Dude.... Not only did the lightning destroy the antenna but there was not enough fiberglass to use for a toothpick! The strike was hellish! I've had aluminum antennas take direct hits and burn or scorch them but it never killed the antennas made from aluminum. Fiberglass on the other hand shatters into a million zillion pieces of dust.
@@Rocklobstah-kv2wf Oh, it was something that I will never forget! I never mentioned this in the video but I woke up to the storm rolling in around 3:30 to 400 am and at the time I had the option of powering the radio from a 12 volt deep cycle trolling battery as a power back-up or from the 110 volt power. That night the radio was switched to battery power. The antenna took the hit about 15 seconds AFTER I unplugged the radio and disconnected the antenna and I was staring right at the coax when the antenna took the hit. There was a loud boom along with a 6 inch spark that jumped directly from the coax coming from the floor straight up to the wall socket above it and I knew the antenna took a direct hit. At that time the antenna was grounded through the guy wires along with a deep ground rod on the tower. My antenna wire runs 6 inches under ground through a 2 inch diameter PVC pipe and wraps around the steel support frame under the house that is also grounded and yet I still had a major spark jump in the radio room! The radio was on at the time and did not get damaged because it was unplugged and disconnected from the antenna. The antenna is now triple grounded. Ground 1 is at the antenna tower. Ground 2 is at the point where the wire leaves from the PVC pipe to the underbelly of the house and the 3rd ground is a dummy coax attached to a deep copper rod underground right under the radio itself where I can redirect the antenna coax directly to ground through a splice barrel either when I'm not home or if a storm rolls in. It's all good now and a lesson learned. I trust this beefed up grounding system I have in place and I sleep better at night knowing the job is now done correctly as far as the safety grounding goes.
Technically you are 100% correct that you should ALWAYS calibrate whenever you either go from the lowest to the highest or the other way around in the band and / or you change bands. After I exercised the demons out of the system, the SWR was very well behaved and I already knew this before I recorded the video. The reason I didn't recalibrate was because I already knew that the SWR wouldn't show any major differences across the frequencies I covered in the video. The antenna I have on the truck has a very wide bandwidth and my main point was to show the skin effect when you don't have a solid ground for the RF. In hind sight and to keep confusion down with the video, I should have followed the book and calibrated each time I changed frequencies or bands. Before I forget, I now use a digital sweep tool which displays the SWR along with the reactance values of the antenna and the SWR is all but textbook perfect with the lowest dip being around 1:1 and the lower and higher frequencies being less than 1:5. Thank you for the reply.
If your trusting internet meters or even external watt see meter..... well find someone with an analyzer and have them show you what your real see is on 26 and 28 and your ohm's. I think you will be surprised how off those meters are.
Not only was the antenna seen very close as a 50 Ohm load to the radio but the inductance reactance and the capacitance reactance was pretty close at the resonance frequency too. I know this because a few years ago I wound up investing into a Rig Expert AA-54 which was the BEST investment I could have ever made for antenna work but yeah, you're right that simple SWR meters can lie to you in a NY minute if you're not careful unless you understand what you're looking for such as bad grounding or even where the antenna is placed on a vehicle along with the lobe direction or in layman's terms where the antenna transmits or receives the best on a vehicle. I was able to fine tune the antenna with the new meter plus it was a great learning tool for me too.
@@Rocklobstah-kv2wf I do have the electronics background but RF can be tricky and like a lot of people this is something you have to either learn from people with the hands on experience or you learn it by doing it every wrong way in the book until you figure out what works and what doesn't work.
flash you are the man. i was having trouble with my swr in my mobile. 2.0 across the bands here in the uk. came across your video last night and did exactly as you said and BOOM swr dropped to 1.2. thanx for making the video it was a great watch. 73s from 26ct1808 south coast of England
Hey I'm glad it worked for you. I've seen people over cut antennas and ruin them trying to fix the SWR issue. This little trick works unless you have a sports car made out of plastic.
Thanks for the video,now I know what my problem is. My boss gave me a 510 Uniden and a new antenna so I can talk to the blacktop trucks as they come in and I tried to set the swr. The antenna has a collar on it to adjust and my meter would do exactly like yours everytime I touched the collar now I know what to do to fix it. I'm glad it wasn't the type of antenna that you cut pieces off to adjust or I would have ruined it. Perfect video.
Works great. I grounded it to one of the seat bolts and my problem went away. It also helped with interferance from my strobe light. Thanks for the help.
Thanks, I hadn't serviced my mobile radio in quite a few years and I had to make myself fix it. I've seen that issue drive people insane so I thought this video might help a few people that play with radio stuff too.
What you have there is 'common mode current'. One of the best ways to diagnose it is to move and grab the coax. I'd utilise a decent coaxial choke looped through an appropriate ferrite toroid/s. Then ground it on the radio side of the choke, sort of like you've done ( because you're running a mag mount). There will be no ill effects by running a correctly made choke. The problem with the amp is to do with rf feedback. Of coarse the cabin is going to be full of this when you up the power. I smoked an Astatic D104-M6B once when I was running a quarter wave droopy insulated from the mast in a portable situation. I mean smoke poured out of it as the plastic was melting behind the metal grill. Gave a nice tingle on the top lip too.
Yeah a common mode current is EXACTLY what it was and it can be corrected with chokes but if you can cure it with good grounding that's even better. There are many roads that lead to Rome when it comes to Voo-Doo electronic issues like this.
Luke if you touch the antenna it will have "BIG" effects on the SWR! What you are looking for is the following symptoms. (1) Touching the radio or the SWR meter (If you are using an external SWR meter) while you are keying up makes the SWR move. (2) Just adding an external SWR meter or a power meter changes the SWR. If that's the case you want to ground your coax midway somewhere in the truck because although your radio may be grounded you may still need an extra ground to kill the ground loop.
Laugh. I love how you display your unlawful amplifier. Owning it! Appreciate your being candid. 30 years ago they would be knocking on your door after seeing this video. :)
You have people that run mini sized freezer "splatter box" amps equal to or greater than the output power of some small AM broadcast radio stations in their houses and those are the ones who deserve a knock on the door. This tiny amp in the truck is not only clean from harmonics but I don't push it either. I have this in the truck because I am well into the boondocks (country) here and it pays off cutting through noise and being heard when I do get onto the highway. Whats crazy is in the UK they recently allowed their CB operators to now run AM so now they can run both AM and FM CB's but the kicker is they upped their legal power limit up to 100 watts. As to hiding this tiny amp, I'm just not pushing anything worth their trouble especially when you have people pushing sweet 16's amps in their cars and trucks.
@@flash001USA You might enjoy Fred in The Shed, he is a UK CBer and is fun to watch?
Happy new year to you and your family! Keep up the good videos.
I just put in a mobile and added a extra ground wire, plus i’m about to put up a base station with copper ran to a rod about 7ft 9inchs deep plus i got a 8 gauge ground wire I’m going to run to my house frame. I hope all this helps with performance and lighting strikes. Thanks for the 411
Rock solid grounding is king! Most rf issues are caused by poor grounding.
Get some copper wire and strip all of the insulation from it if it has any then rap it around the exposed copper braid on the coax followed with resealing the coax with electrical tape to protect it from damage. Be sure to leave about 6 inches length of the copper wire you added from the coax so that you can tie it to a solid ground on the truck like I did in this video. Now go and check the SWR. Hopefully this solved the issue. Let me know if this makes sense to you.
insulated copper wire will render the ground ineffective?
You are a Renascence man flash. Thanks for sharing buddy.
To check for RF ground loops key up the radio while watching the SWR meter and then lay your hand on the radio. Repeat this by running your hand up and down on the coax that is coming from the antenna. If the SWR moves you probably need to ground the coax midway to the truck's steel. You can carefully strip some of the outer plastic shielding from coax to expose the copper braid but DO NOT cut or damage it. Cont:
I meant to say this in my last reply. The collar moves up and down correct? You don't try to adjust it while keying the radio. What you do is look at channel 1 and channel 40. If the SWR is higher on 40 but decent on 1 the antenna is electrically too long and I think you would raise the collar to fool the antenna into thinking it's shorter. If the SWR looks OK on 1 but high on 40, you would lower the rings for the opposite effect. If it won't adjust then you have possible grounding issues Cont:
You should invest in a good lightning arrestor to install inline with your coax going to the antenna. It will protect your equipment and house if your antenna gets hit by lightning. Just be sure to ground it. I agree antennas must have a good ground plane in order to work correctly. I don't think the mag-mount is providing you with a good ground plane. The paint on vehicles sometimes messes with the grounding when using these types of mounts. A simple fix would be to lay a thin piece of sheet metal under the mount (not sure how your paint would hold up). Larsen mounts are great as long as they are attached to metal chassis of you vehicle (i.e. under the hood or trunk). Ceiling & Trunk mounts a that require holes to be drill are little more involved, sometimes you have to make a ground cable that extends from the coax connector to the chassis similar to what you showed. The vehicle chassis is essentially the ground plane for mobile mount antennas and if you don't have a good metal to metal contact you will have problem.
Very helpful information, thank you
i wish i could thumbs up this video a million times i kept asking old timers about MY HIGH SWR they would say my connections or meter and shit gee whizz thanks FLASH gettibg a heater soon and had to fix this problem thanks
I marvel at the number of persons willing to publish video confessions of illegal activity.
You should collect all of the youtube video links along with websites with this activity and contact the FCC along with all of the law enforcement agencies with this damming information.
Ahhhh, it worked! That's good.
Thanks, I'll be trying it tomorrow.
I have a Silver streak 150 also , great box
It's an old box that I rebuilt years ago. It's now my back-up box.
OK... A ground loop is where you have a high enough resistance where the current from the RF or even current from a power source will have the tendency to move from it's intended paths into other paths that conduct. In other words, the RF from the coax will want to leak out and cause the coax itself to become part of the antenna and a simple workaround is to physically ground the coax to the vehicle which will help and in most cases stop the RF from splattering around in the vehicle . A common issue besides a poor SWR is the microphone can get hot in your hand from RF if you are in the range of 100+ watts plus this will make you sound muffled. All I did was put a splice in my coax near my seatbelt mount. I wrapped some braided wire around the splice barrel then I taped it to keep it in place. The wire was then bolted to the seatbelt mounting bolt. You have to keep the wire as short as possible when you do this. In other words you wouldn't want to have use foot of wire as a ground or it will become part of the issue too. I take my power directly from the battery so I had ground loops and I eliminated them by making tie points with the coax to the body of the vehicle . I hope this helps answer your question.
Almost forgot... The large base on the magnet mount has a very large capacitance so the RF can easily couple to the roof of the car. The capacitance (coupling effect) is good enough that the RF sees it as a direct connection or at the very least very close to it. Since this video I have made a mounting bracket that ties to the truck bed then goes to the triple magnet mount in the video. I am now using a 102 inch whip that mounts to the bracket. I may do a new video on this soon because this works with a very good SWR across a wide frequency span.
Pample Moose Copper Electronics
Grounding surely plays havoc, I get a problem sometimes with my SWR meter, when I go to set it FWD, the meter is eractic...Think that's a ground problem as well??
+Junior D It's possible. The best way to see if it is a grounding issue (Ground loop) is while keying the radio up grab the coax and run it thru your hand while you watch the SWR. If it moves around peel back about 1 inch of the outer plastic shield exposing the inner copper shield somewhere about halfway down the coax but be careful not to cut it or damage the inner copper shield..
Take some braided copper wire and wrap it around the copper shield then tape it to hold the copper wire you added and to protect where you stripped back the outer plastic lining being sure to use a long enough piece of wire to ground the cable with.
Take the copper wire and ground it to the seat belt mounting bolt that holds it to the frame of even to a bolt that holds one of your seats to the frame of the car or truck and most of the time this will fix the issue unless you have a fiberglass body and the antenna itself isn't seeing a ground plane path. If that's the case you will have to get some aluminum duct tape and build a ground plane for the antenna. If you are driving a older car or a truck it won't have a fiberglass hood or roof.
Common your radio ground with the ground installed by your power company. Without that, the lightening can strike your antenna, and follow its way to the ground from your power company, killing everything in between.
The antenna was actually grounded at the coax at the antenna itself along with all of the steel guide wires that went into steel anchors that hold the guy wires but that wasn't enough ground. The antenna is now grounded in 5 places along the coax path with solid copper coated grounding rods including right before the coax goes to the radio itself and during a bad storm or if we are away there is a dummy wire that the coax can be screwed into to loop the wire in the house directly to a copper ground rod that is 5 feet into the ground directly under the radio. Problem handled.
@@flash001USA I don't know what all you just typed, it was simple, did you connect your radio ground to your homes power line ground, or not. You can have a thousand grounds on your radio, but it it does not connect to the power line ground of your home, it can lead to bad things when lightening strikes.
@@JosephMassimino In a house you have a hot along with a neutral and then you have an earth ground unless you're dealing with a very old house that only has a hot and neutral on the wall sockets. A lot of people aren't aware of this but the earth's ground used by the power company serves a couple of purposes one of them being to get rid of ground loops from the telephone pole to the house and I'm pretty sure you've probably noticed on most telephone poles where the transformer is there is almost always a heavy copper wire running down the side of the pole that goes to ground. Whenever you're grounding to the third prong on your AC wall socket, you should technically be going to a earth ground too and as long as the electrician that wired the house up did their job correctly then the third grounding prong on the AC receptacles in the house should all tie to the metal case of the fuse box which in turn finds itself to a earth ground. In some cases especially on older residential houses, earth ground will be shared with the neutral plug maybe because they didn't have a choice at the time for whatever the reasoning was. I wanted to make sure we were on the same page as far as how you and I describe ground. Since the lightning strike my antenna now has five earth grounds using copper grounding rods going five feet into the ground along the coax path. Yes the radio itself along with power supplies and other accessories use a 3 prong plug that take them to earth ground which is also tied to the metal fuse box case which also ties to the power company transformer on the pole. I always had that before I added all of the extra ground points on the coax cable leading into the house. The way I'm grounded is correct and safe with the only difference being now I have many grounding points along the RF coax cable path as a safety precaution. Hopefully that clears up what I was trying to relay it to you and sorry for any confusion.
@@flash001USA % foot ground rods in some states is going into dry earth. Here in Florida where the water table at some times of the years is at, or very close to the surface, my ground rods go down 10 feet, so they remain in wet soil at all times. I found the 5 foot ground rod used by the power company, and I pounded a 10 foot rod right next to it ,and clamped them together, while at the same time connecting it to my radio room, and tower ground system. I did not know that you lived in a very old house with no ground system to the power from the power company.
@@JosephMassimino Joe I live in a modern house but in the past (many years ago) I've lived in houses that only used the older two prong plugs. Thankfully here in SC the ground isn't bone dry and the last grounding rod under the house is in earth ground that is always damp due to no sun able to reach it so a 5 foot grounding rod will get the job done.
im gona try this on my jeep wrangler, i installed everything brand new ,new cb max rad antenna, its on a taillight bracket,trying to match it ,i cant get it under 2 on swr,ill keep you posted, thank you!!!
The main thing besides a few solid grounding points along the coax path is for the antenna to be able to interact with the body of the vehicle so that the antenna can develop a decent lobe. Good luck.
I didn't see it set to Calibration
what could be wrong with wilson mobil antennas. i have tuned alot of mobil antennas and have gotten them way down in s. w. r. i have tried three different mobil wilson antennas in the same spot, same solid mount no magnets... and the best s. w. r. i have ever gotten was a 1.5. on all three wilson mobil antennas. i ground the things in multiple places, no good. i put a firestick or hustler on the same mount and my s. w. r. is about perfect. ?????
When it comes to antennas sometimes only the shadow knows. It also depends on the vehicle along with the location of the antenna too. I have always had issues with the center loaded antennas like the hustler where other people had great SWR with them and recently I tried out a firestick and I fought to get a good SWR on it. I have had the best luck with antennas that have the loading coil at the bottom or the base of the antenna. I've never tried out a Wilson antenna but I do know people have had great results with those as well.
I need some advice getting my sw down its up in the 3s now and I don't know we're to start can you give me some advice please
I have a Ford Ranger truck and I've used a Wilson 2000 and a Procomm quad wrap antennas. I tried 2 brand new different ant mounts with brand new coax and my swr runs 1.5. I have a Texas Star 250 with a 3 foot jumper. When I use the amp, my swr goes up to 2 or above. Any help would be appreciated.
It's definitely an RF ground Loop issue. I had the same problem with my truck. A lot of people see that same issue when they run a little bit of power. Try the following and you may be pretty amazed at how well this helps. Figure out where you can add some ground tap points along the floor in the vehicle so that you can ground the coax coming from the antenna to the chassis of the body of the vehicle. Do it where the wire comes in to the vehicle and do it somewhere near where the antenna cable will hook into the radio. All you have to do is strip a little bit of the coax plastic coating back without damaging the copper braid or the actual antenna wire and rap you a little bit of soft braided copper wire around it so that you have a ground point on the actual coax cable itself then tape it up so that it's sealed from any kind of dampness or anything else that can get in there and corrode the coax wire.. Once you do that ground the wire that you added to the coax cable to the metal chassis on the vehicle which could be anywhere along the floor or near a seat where there may be a bolt you can tie the wire to without the need for drilling holes unless you just have to. Two things to mention here. You don't need to strip back but maybe a quarter of an inch of plastic off the coax and the second thing is keep your newly added grounding wires as physically short as you can to wherever the ground point is on the chassis. You'll be amazed how much of a difference this will make. Your problem sounds identical to what I had with my truck. Let me know how it turns out.
Couldn't you just wrap braid around the outer section of the pl 259 as it is connected to the shield of the coax anyway
You want to ground it midway in the vehicle before it screws into the back of the radio. You could cut the coax and add a splice barrel and wrap braid around the splice barrel and either use a small hose clamp to make sure the braided wire is touching the splice barrel with a solid contact or you could just wrap braid around it and tape it as tight as possible to accomplish the same thing. If someone didn't want to add a splice barrel then the idea I mentioned with stripping back some plastic shield from the coax to expose the outer copper braided shield is also a valid "second choice" option.
jumper is too short.
@@flash001USA thank you. I will try
great video i have a question. my base station as an SWR meter built into it. my SWR are 1.2 BUT when i add an external watt / swr meter the SWR meter in the radio goes high like 2.5 but the SWR on the external meter is 1.2 . i have changed jumpers and even tried a different external meter but get the same results. get you give me some insight on this please. thanks !! and 73s
Is the radio grounded in the house? I don't mean by the ground jack on the wall socket. I've seen this before and just like the mobile it always turns out to be an RF loop issue. Sometimes you can go under the house or the room where the radio is and put a ground rod deep into the ground then you put a splice barrel in the cable BEFORE it comes in the house where you make sure the barrel is physically attached to the grounding rod. Be sure to seal the barrel connector and the coax from any kind of moisture or water from seeping in. A second trick would to do the same thing I mentioned and add a 1 foot loop out of 10 or 12 feet of coax that you tie together with nylon ties to keep it together. Lay this on the ground under the house then feed the other end to the splice barrel on the grounding rod and this not only gives you some lightning protection but it will remove most if not ALL stray RF. I'm running an IMAX 2000 and my SWR is as stable as it gets with any decent meter I have inline plus the radio's SWR meter follows the external meter. I hope this helps.
flash001USA there is no ground on the radio plug. i found that very odd but seems to be the normal for these old units? The antenna has 2 - ten foot ground rods with 8 gauge copper right to the antenna U bolts
No problem about not having a place to hook a ground up to either the radio or the amp. You can just take some stripped copper wire and run a few turns around the coax connector on the back of the radio and hook your ground wire to that or if you grounded under the house you don't have to mess with any of that because the coax will be grounded before it even comes up to the radio and amp. If you have an antenna on the side of your house make sure that it's grounded outside. The more grounds you have the better everything will function. The trick I mentioned about a 1-foot loop of wire with about 10 or 12 turns on it under the house laid on the ground actually works. People do that in cars that don't have a lot of Steel so that they can get the ground plane they need but it really does work with the application that I'm talking about. Trust me when I tell you it'll be like you're talking on a completely different radio that's how much of a better of a performance you'll see from it. Been there done that.
It sounds like you have the antenna grounding covered but as far as the radio or the amp goes that's simple enough to ground. Just ground to the radio or the amp's chassis or strip some copper wire and wrap a few loops of copper wire around the RF connector to hook a ground wire to. The method I mentioned in the 1st reply will make a BIG difference in the performance of your radio to the point it will be a completely different setup in the way it performs and if you ground the coax under the house you can avoid running more wires to the radio.
flash001USA thanks again I will give that a try. I live In Florida so there is no " under the house " but I understand what your explaining. So the radio swr and meter swr should match ? One at a time they both read the same BUT in line the radio reads high swr. I was told it's not really an issue as long as the external meter is reading low SWR. it just doesnt seem right to me.
What does your standing wave go to, when you take the meter out of line??
There is very little change with the radios SWR meter when the external meter is removed. Since this video I invested into a high end self powered SWR meter that doesn't require a radio and it sweeps whatever bandwidth or single channel you choose and it was a good investment. It also confirmed what I was demonstrating at the time of this video so that was a good thing.
So when setting my swr the meter is maxing out cant get it to drop down any I have ohm out everything and still cant find anything wrong do u think grounding out the coax will help I have been at it for days and cant figure anything out also inam running a dual setup
Yeah, it's worth a try because you can have everything technically correct but RF can pull voodoo magic havoc
and you can easily misdiagnose and chase an issue that turns out to be something totally unexpected such as a RF return or grounding issue. Hopefully you aren't dealing with a vehicle that has a fiberglass body because that requires a few special mods to make it work correctly. Let me know how it turns out for you.
@@flash001USA I am dealing with a 01 chevy tahoe
@@flshiner5200 Are you using a magnetic mount antenna or some sort of mounted bracket?
@@flash001USA I am using a mount to the roof rack and have 2 grounds from the body to the bracket
@@flash001USA sorry I haven't got back to u been busy I took it to my local cb shop and had them test the swr he said I was around 2.5 then I did the ground like in your video and haven't been back up yet to check it but from talking to a few ppl since the ground installing I am getting much clearer transmitting will let u know more when he gets done tuning my other cb
Very informative flash001usa.... Thanks
Mister there is a drawing fault at 14.33.
What are you seeing that is incorrect? This came from the I max 2000 exposed website.
Above, the capacitor A is dead to ground so no rf voltage there. Only capacitor B can be seen in the lower drawing. And those 2 balls are not seen in the lower drawing either. Is that a mark 2 or sometin ?
check out my installation video of how i wired a couple radios to get some tips as well as leave me feedback thanks
Let me know what happens.
Got a problem maybe you can help with. I have a Falcon made Dipole Antenna pre tuned for 11m and my SWR no matter what I do is 2.5 or 3.. I don't know what I'm doing wrong I've got 18' of new coax and insulators and all. Got any tips?
SHAD0Wc0n dipoles wont get below 1.7 unless its way up in air.
What is the length of your wires?
I didn't see it set to Celebration
I had already been testing before I started recording the video so I knew where the SWR stood before I started the video. Yeah I set the meter beforehand and the changes didn't change that much switching between the bands.
Oh ok
@@petersannicolas8949 Yeah, the way I did this was to tune the antenna for the lowest SWR on Ch 20 and to calibrate to Ch 20 on the regular CB bands. I repeated testing the SWR on the bands including calibrating the SWR meters before I even started recording the video just to make sure that everything was reasonably accurate. There wasn't enough of a difference between the band calibrations so what I did here was to do the calibrations on the standard CB band instead. The difference in calibrating even between Ch 1 and Ch 40 really didn't make enough difference to calibrate and even jumping out of band the difference was very little. I should have mentioned that in the video but I didn't so I can see where someone would have questions. Thanks for the feedback.
That and an understanding wife.
flash do you live in the upstate.... I currently live in Pendleton
Yeah right at the edge of Cherokee County. You're probably around 75 - 85 miles from me.
Seems to me your antenna isn't grounded properly
You're correct. Originally the antenna wasn't grounded well enough and then I tied the coax into the vehicle body and got a good solid ground at which point the antenna issues completely straightened up. Most magnetic mount antennas couple through capacitance to the body of the vehicle and sometimes this is more than enough especially with older full size vehicles with larger roofs or trunk lids but with these little trucks, it can be hit and miss. I made this video quite a few years ago and the grounding fix I made is still holding up to this day. Something else is these small trucks don't really offer a good ground plane on the top of their roofs and you'll see people choose to either mount an antenna to the back bumper with a 102 inch stainless steel whip which I did for a while or even mount the antenna inside of the truck bed but I didn't want to do that. The only reason I decided to get away from the 102 steel whip is because I wanted a different lobe pattern. What I have now has decent ears in front of the truck and in back of the truck along with a well behaved SWR low or high power.
A larger or additional magnet on the mount might also help? Interesting on your wire, curious, how long, is it multiple 1/4 waves? Also, a ground wire right at the radio could also add more ground plane effect? A single magnet on the mount can handle just the radio but needs help as the wattage goes up. A very interesting video enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing !!!
how do you set the swr on a maco without radials / 19 ft. long
Rocko jekins Is that what you are trying to set up? If the antenna was designed with radials it probably won't tune without them. The coax along with the pole will act somewhat as a radial but it won't work good because it won't be at the right wavelength so the tuning will be hit and miss with you.
nice
So it blew the antena...scary stuff
Dude.... Not only did the lightning destroy the antenna but there was not enough fiberglass to use for a toothpick! The strike was hellish! I've had aluminum antennas take direct hits and burn or scorch them but it never killed the antennas made from aluminum. Fiberglass on the other hand shatters into a million zillion pieces of dust.
@@flash001USA Wouldn't want to be anywhere near it when that happened!
@@Rocklobstah-kv2wf Oh, it was something that I will never forget! I never mentioned this in the video but I woke up to the storm rolling in around 3:30 to 400 am and at the time I had the option of powering the radio from a 12 volt deep cycle trolling battery as a power back-up or from the 110 volt power. That night the radio was switched to battery power. The antenna took the hit about 15 seconds AFTER I unplugged the radio and disconnected the antenna and I was staring right at the coax when the antenna took the hit. There was a loud boom along with a 6 inch spark that jumped directly from the coax coming from the floor straight up to the wall socket above it and I knew the antenna took a direct hit. At that time the antenna was grounded through the guy wires along with a deep ground rod on the tower. My antenna wire runs 6 inches under ground through a 2 inch diameter PVC pipe and wraps around the steel support frame under the house that is also grounded and yet I still had a major spark jump in the radio room! The radio was on at the time and did not get damaged because it was unplugged and disconnected from the antenna. The antenna is now triple grounded. Ground 1 is at the antenna tower. Ground 2 is at the point where the wire leaves from the PVC pipe to the underbelly of the house and the 3rd ground is a dummy coax attached to a deep copper rod underground right under the radio itself where I can redirect the antenna coax directly to ground through a splice barrel either when I'm not home or if a storm rolls in. It's all good now and a lesson learned. I trust this beefed up grounding system I have in place and I sleep better at night knowing the job is now done correctly as far as the safety grounding goes.
You aren’t getting correct SWR readings. You have to set cal every time you change frequency or RF power.
Technically you are 100% correct that you should ALWAYS calibrate whenever you either go from the lowest to the highest or the other way around in the band and / or you change bands. After I exercised the demons out of the system, the SWR was very well behaved and I already knew this before I recorded the video. The reason I didn't recalibrate was because I already knew that the SWR wouldn't show any major differences across the frequencies I covered in the video. The antenna I have on the truck has a very wide bandwidth and my main point was to show the skin effect when you don't have a solid ground for the RF. In hind sight and to keep confusion down with the video, I should have followed the book and calibrated each time I changed frequencies or bands. Before I forget, I now use a digital sweep tool which displays the SWR along with the reactance values of the antenna and the SWR is all but textbook perfect with the lowest dip being around 1:1 and the lower and higher frequencies being less than 1:5. Thank you for the reply.
hello sr would you be able to help me set up a pirate radio lol jk
Arrghhh matey! Shiver me timbers! A pirate radio aye?
If your trusting internet meters or even external watt see meter..... well find someone with an analyzer and have them show you what your real see is on 26 and 28 and your ohm's. I think you will be surprised how off those meters are.
Not only was the antenna seen very close as a 50 Ohm load to the radio but the inductance reactance and the capacitance reactance was pretty close at the resonance frequency too. I know this because a few years ago I wound up investing into a Rig Expert AA-54 which was the BEST investment I could have ever made for antenna work but yeah, you're right that simple SWR meters can lie to you in a NY minute if you're not careful unless you understand what you're looking for such as bad grounding or even where the antenna is placed on a vehicle along with the lobe direction or in layman's terms where the antenna transmits or receives the best on a vehicle. I was able to fine tune the antenna with the new meter plus it was a great learning tool for me too.
Like many things in life, you just gotta know what you're doing. 👍
@@Rocklobstah-kv2wf I do have the electronics background but RF can be tricky and like a lot of people this is something you have to either learn from people with the hands on experience or you learn it by doing it every wrong way in the book until you figure out what works and what doesn't work.