102 whip

Since so much of it will be surrounded by things that can reflex signal...I kinda think it would be hard to tune...not an expert, just an educated guess.

 

If you are planning on putting this on a big truck dont get a 102" whip. Best antennea for the money is a Wilson 2000 IMHO.

 

Heres the thing. If you dont have 10,000 watts to push thru it dont spend the money on a 10K Watt ant. Its not gonna help your recieve or transmit any. Get an ant that is relativeto the size of your power unit. If you r stock the wilson u have now is more than enough.

 

The 102 works best when it's sitting straight up. If you tie it down to the truck, and then try to transmit, you may run into a bunch of SWR reflect. Not what you want. And if the 102 happens to touch a bare piece of metal and you transmit....:smt103

But yes as a rule the 102 whip works better than pretty much all antennas.

 

With an antenna, height is might...
Smaller antennas use coils, sprial windings, etc to simulate the bigger length...
Mounting and tuning is important....but all other things beaing equal, physical size is better....the 102 is usually the simplest most effective solution when it will fit.
not to get a big debate about which antana is best, but selecting the propper antana for the location is very important...as is construction..such as where the coil id located, and if it is top loaded, center, or continuous....
Imo right behind the 102, a basic fiberglass anteanna does a good job bang for the buck if the transmit power is not high....
The 10k etc's look cool....but let's every thief know that you spent some $$ on it and your radio....

 

COILS = LOSS the more coils the more LOSS ....

 

That is understandable but in the trucking world, coils of somesort are a must.

There is no place on a truck to mount a straight whip antenna without running into issues. it is either way too high and would take out low flying aircraft while going down the road or it is too low and completely surrounded my a bunch of metal.

Every trucker style antenna has coils of some sort. They are either open coils, enclosed in a plastic bubble or coils wrapped around fiberglass or inside fiberglass.

The loner the antenna is means there are less coils, thus they work better then the shorter antennas because the shorter antennas have more coils.

Then we have to deal with flex, longer antennas tend to flew more going down the road. They swing back toward exhaust stacks etc which causes some reflect issues.

I have had problems with the wilson fiberglass series of antennas. The winding would break off the base after a shgort period of time. You would be going down the road and all of a sudden your radio won't work, the warning light will light up and SWR will be pegged. I bought a few replacments until I figured out how to fix the design flaw for good.

Some silver solder and some shrink wrap and they were better then new.

I also found that is all of my applications, removing the adjustable stinger tip alltogether, gave the best tune ie lowest SWR. I did have to fix some grounding issues on both trucks since the mirror brackets did nto have proper grounding through the door etc. You can not rely on door hinges for a proper ground.