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| It's been a long time since we used CB's on anything except a semi, now all the tractor hoods and roofs are fiberglass so they are not the best for antennas.
My son is wanting to put CB's in his excavator, dozer and scraper tractor so that they can easily talk on a job site. It's also handy to be able to spot dump trailers hauling gravel and dirt. The hardest one to figure out is the JD 8430 on the scraper because there is not much that would be considered a ground plane. Along with that is the problem of height and not wanting to get it caught on power lines or trees.
We thought about cutting a circle out of a sheet of aluminum to put under the antenna if that would help. Most of the time they will only need to talk less than a 1/4 mile.
Edit: let me add I realize they are not going to talk a long ways, but they don't have to, we've got cell phones if we need them and on the rest of our farm equipment we have business band fm's, but for the cost he can put 3 CB's in that will do what he wants for less than half what 1 new fm will be set up on our repeater. And in the case of spotting trucks hauling into jobsites the CB will work where the fm wouldn't be of any value. In our semi's the cb's work really good for about a mile so long as you keep the wires clean and tight. I've been on several job sites where the contractors had CB's and could talk you right into some tight places easier than trying to watch someone outside for hand signals.
Any suggestions, ideas or photo's of what you do would be appreciated.
Thanks for the help,
Ray
Edited by Ray (ecks) 10/17/2006 14:09
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need advice for mounting CB antennas
