CB Radio

[The Rev]

Righton JB,
That's good Johnny. The "standard" or I should say the benckmark for antenna tuning is a SWR below 1.5. Now there was another thing which I failed to mention before and that was the SWR changes along the band of frequencies that you operate on. When you tune your antenna, be sure to tune it for the middle of the band. That way the antenna will work best there and only be about 1.5 at the upeer and lower ends. If you tune it to a minimum SWR at lets say CH1, then tune to CH40, the antenna will be operating with the maximum SWR on CH40 which may be 2.0 or greater. That means a lot of power will be reflected back into the radio and not radiated into the atomshpere. Since CB is regulated to only 4 watts into the antenna system, your low power output will be eaten up by the mismatched antenna. This means you may be damaging the radio and at some point down the road, you may have to replace it. Low SWR makes all the difference in the world and will give a "booming" signal even to a cheap low power radio. Also, remember that HF radio transmission is greatly affected by the ionoshpere which does most of the work for us in long distance communication. Sometimes when conditions are right, a low power mobile raio will be able to communicate with guys half a world away. Now that's cool too!