my local ham radio community!

The tower is up now. I'll add a few pictures later. All together I had help from 5 hams and Jeff, who's not a ham, but his business is radio and microwave links as well as tower climbing. He said in his world that's not a tower. He's climbed to 600 feet on the job. It was a great tower party!

There was some concern that the guy wires might throw the swr off. Wow, it tunes a flat 1:1 across all the bands with the internal tuner! I just talked to a station in Indiana while testing on 29.6mhz FM. Both of us are running 100 watts and the signal report both ways was s9+10.

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%.

There was some concern that the guy wires might throw the swr off.  Wow, it tunes a flat 1:1 across all the bands with the internal tuner! I just talked to a station in Indiana while testing on 29.6mhz FM. Both of us are running 100 watts and the signal report both ways was s9+10.

Everybody's getting a tower but me.

Terry

Did you assemble the tower on the ground and winch it up? That's what I did with mine 35 years ago. Now my wife is 77 and probably not able to winch it down and back up again. 25 years ago she winched up our water tower, too, while I pushed with the tractor bucket to get it started up.