my local ham radio community!

I’ll never get into ham but I have been getting back into CB’s lately since I started driving part time. The trucks have radios that suck. The radio broke in my truck so I put my own portable unit in.

We have a few drivers in the area that have very nicely tuned radios. Loud and clear and when on the logging roads you need a good radio. I built a mount that I can swap between trucks and tuned the swr to where the needle barely moves. As good as it gets. I am now wanting a bit more.

I just bought a used meter on eBay so I can tune my old radio. I want to get the modulation up to 100% and possibly take the power up a tad. I don’t want a linear or anything illegal. I just want to maximize the Cobra 29 classic without adding anything to it. If I can get a super clear sound out of it and a few miles of extra range I will be happy.

I’m pretty ignorant to radios and tuning but I have been reading, and sorting through the crap, about how to peak and tune the radio. There really isn’t one good source I have found online to show me how to do it all at once. When my meter arrives I’ll bring the radio home and set it up and check everything against the meter and then adjust one issue at a time until I get it 100%.

The shooter's apprentice makes a good point. The "antenna" is really 1/2 an antenna. The other 1/2 is the ground plane. Making sure the antenna is grounded to the truck is important, probably the best improvement you can make.  If you don't have good continuity between the antenna mount and the chassis the use of ground strap (usually woven strap) would be in order. If you're driving different trucks this would be a pita.
Since RF flows on the surface of the wire, not in the wire itself, second best would be stranded wire.
K0bg's site is best I've seen regarding mobile antenna grounding. Start with his article on bonding.
http://k0bg.com/
While he's right in his statement that it's the metal under the antenna rather than alongside it, we can't have everything. Mirror mounts aren't the ideal setup, but they can still work well.
I keep adding thoughts on here.
Properly grounded mirror mounts actually work quite well on a tractor trailer because of the massive size of the ground plane. k0bg is correct that the vehicle technically isn't the ground plane, but is a capacitor between the antenna and ground, but to keep things simple think of it as the ground plane.