Brody
July 20th, 2010, 06:56 AM
OK, I have a very basic CB question..and by that, I don't mean something like "How do you talk 'southern' (ie: like you have an IQ of 20, need directions on toilet paper, and sound like you have a mouth full of grits)".....Oh...and anyone from the south, don't take offense because I was born south of the Mason Dixon Line myself....
I have had a huge number of CB radios over the years. Most of them have been the plus minus wires, a fuse, find a mount, twist in the antenna wire and talk kind. A while back, after mounting my antenna in about 6 different places to get better reception and still not having it work right, my antenna mount gave up the ghost and the antenna was bouncing around in the back of my heap. All of a sudden, I was getting very good reception, this while my antenna was ungrounded. As I had always tried to mount my antenna so that it was grounded well, I was puzzled. Looking around in my box of junk, I found another mount for it. This was an aluminum mount and was designed to mount on the mirror post. At any rate, I remounted the antenna to the aluminum mount and attached that mount to the aluminum angle on the back of my heap that is mounted on top of my fiberglass fenders...where nothing is grounded. It works just fine. Before this, I had the steel mount mounted to my exo cage, which is welded to the frame and very thoroughly grounded.
Since we all know how well aluminum acts as a ground for anything(as in not), and there has been a lot of talk about how everything that is connected to the CB needs to be grounded very well, what is the deal here? Todd said that the antenna I had probably needed to be isolated and had an internal ground. OK, so what happens if you ground it again and why does that screw things up? And before anyone posts up, yes, it does have the plastic isolators in the right place, too....
Really curious here. I had much the same set up as the current one on two or three other rigs, where I had a full cage and the CB mount mounted to the cage and had no problems with the CB...again cheapo CBs, nothing fancy.
So as Ricky Ricardo used to say, "'Splain this to me, Lucy"
I have had a huge number of CB radios over the years. Most of them have been the plus minus wires, a fuse, find a mount, twist in the antenna wire and talk kind. A while back, after mounting my antenna in about 6 different places to get better reception and still not having it work right, my antenna mount gave up the ghost and the antenna was bouncing around in the back of my heap. All of a sudden, I was getting very good reception, this while my antenna was ungrounded. As I had always tried to mount my antenna so that it was grounded well, I was puzzled. Looking around in my box of junk, I found another mount for it. This was an aluminum mount and was designed to mount on the mirror post. At any rate, I remounted the antenna to the aluminum mount and attached that mount to the aluminum angle on the back of my heap that is mounted on top of my fiberglass fenders...where nothing is grounded. It works just fine. Before this, I had the steel mount mounted to my exo cage, which is welded to the frame and very thoroughly grounded.
Since we all know how well aluminum acts as a ground for anything(as in not), and there has been a lot of talk about how everything that is connected to the CB needs to be grounded very well, what is the deal here? Todd said that the antenna I had probably needed to be isolated and had an internal ground. OK, so what happens if you ground it again and why does that screw things up? And before anyone posts up, yes, it does have the plastic isolators in the right place, too....
Really curious here. I had much the same set up as the current one on two or three other rigs, where I had a full cage and the CB mount mounted to the cage and had no problems with the CB...again cheapo CBs, nothing fancy.
So as Ricky Ricardo used to say, "'Splain this to me, Lucy"