Ugh, my lousy antenna works wonderfully!

[Mentor3006]

So now I have a problem. My new radio, a President McKinley II FCC is freshly installed in my camper van. I tried setting up a Firestik II on a fender mount but the SWRs were nightmarishly high. I went ahead and dredged out my 30 year old Realistic Mag Mount I used to use when we took my exes car on road trips, and although I had to trim off some antenna to get it short enough to get the SWRs to come in, boy did they come in at 1.0 across the band.

So I had an event I did this evening, and decided to try to get a radio check on my way home. I was by the Nassau Bay Hilton across the street from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and hit up ch 21 for a radio check, I was getting reports back from Texas City, Hitchcock, and Baytown TX, so 16, 18 and 20 miles (by road) from my position at the time, hitting them as they stated, like I was parked next to them...

I am happy it works, but darn it, I don't want to like this awful old antenna...

[TNT1450]

I'm guessing you weren't getting a good ground with the fender mount antenna for some reason. Or maybe the body of the van was reflecting a lot of the RF back into the antenna.

[Mentor3006]

Well the thought of ground and reflectivity from the van body occurred to me. I ran a 12ga wire from the mount to the chassis ground and moved the mount to the furthest forward fender bolt to get the antenna as far away from the cabin of the van as possible. That helped, a LOT, I got the SWR to come in smack on as it should be, until I went to reinstall the cap over the tuneable tip on the FIrestik. The tip threads seem sloppy, and if I take it out and look down the shaft, it looks like wire is in there broken, I think I have a bad antenna. A replacement is on its way from Amazon and is due today.

I had experience with Firestik antennas years ago, okay decades ago, and they were, while not quite the performers a 102 was, they were the preferred antenna for the 4x4 crowd as they took a ton of abuse and kept SWR stable. I get on here though and I see a lot of hate for these antennas and that is something completely new to me... I guess their QC went bad or something...