Hi i have my cb and swr all hooked up properly, i grounded it down to the chassis and everything is in line. Only problem is once i put it in the cal/fwd position and calibrate the needle to the set position and then switch it over to swr, its reading in the red constantly if not above the red. Any suggestions to the problem?
CB SWR read problem
- Thread starter smitty10
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If the antenna is grounded and the coax is not kinked, broken, or otherwise shorted, it is most likely a ground plane problem for that particular antenna. What antenna are you using, and where is it mounted, and on what truck?
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- #3
Its a wilson antenna and it is mounted on my bed rail directly behind my rear windows on a 95 chevy 1500 reg cab 4x4. I had two antennas one for looks and the other hooked up. I switched them around after having problems with the origanal one and it improved slightly but not much. Then i routed a piece of wire from the ground wire down to my frame and got even a little better but still not much. Is it possible that using the CB several times before tuning could have possibly screwed something up internally on the CB?
Which Wilson antenna? They make many models; some like the Flex are very forgiving of lack of ground plane but others are not. Although, your pickup bed ought to be a decent ground plane.
And yes, transmitting through an antenna with high SWR will reflect power (converted to heat) back to the transmitter and can burn out the finals.
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- #5
its a wilson silver load antenna. Im starting to believe that i possibly burned out the CB. It use to pick up signals and one of the weather channels clear as day and now nothing. Although when i waxs messing around with the swr i started getting decent reception from quite a few channels but the swr still read way too high
The lower the SWR, the more watts pushed through your antenna and the higher the SWR the less watts pushed?
I've got 6 wraps off of my 3' Firestick to get SWRs of 1.1 and 2.0 with an 18' coax. Should I remove more or get another antenna?
I played with it again. I've got 1.1 from channel 1-32 then jumps to 1.8 up to 40. I cut some more and spaced it up slightly then wound tight the last 4 wraps.