April 14, 2026 – How to improve the Performance of your mobile or Base Radio?

Good evening. This is W1UT and tonight’s training is about “How to improve the Performance of your mobile or Base Radio?”

The most important part of a mobile station for best performance is the antenna. There are many types of antennas that can be mounted on a vehicle. The preferred location is on the cab if a truck or on the roof on a passenger vehicle. This may not always be possible especially if you will be driving your vehicle into a parking garage. Some vehicles have steel bodies which allows the use of a magnetic mount type of antenna base. These are convenient as they can easily be removed. The performance difference between a permanently mounted antenna and a mag mount is negligible. If the body of your vehicle is non-conductive a half-wave antenna would be the best choice. For aluminum body types a trunk lip mount or hood edge mount antenna may be the best choice. Personally I prefer ¼ wave antennas as they are short, radiate a bit higher above the horizon (think repeater height) and are much less likely to hit low level objects. Here in the mountainous west it is recommended that you generally use maximum power especially in canyons and rugged terrain.

For a base station setup plan on installing an external antenna. Besides the radio there are basically two aspects of your station for best performance. First is the antenna along with its height and second the feedline. The size and type of antenna is largely dependent on how far you wish to communicate and the height of the antenna. Distance performance is directly proportional to the height of the antenna. A directional antenna type provides the greatest range assuming it is the same height of another type, but is more expensive, difficult to install and requires a rotator. In the old days when aluminum antennas were cheap many hams in non-mountainous terrain put up phased 11 element beams. They worked extremely well. The easiest and simple installations are some sort of a collinear stick approximately 10 ft in length, provides omni-directional gain and is reasonably cheap or you can build one if you wish. A good example is a J-pole type. Off-the-shelf collinears do not normally require tuning. Remember that antenna gain performance is reciprocal meaning your transmitted and received signal both benefit from the antenna’s gain.

The last important part of your base station is the feedline carrying your signal up to the antenna. Do not skimp on buying cheap feedline. The losses on VHF and especially UHF can be high depending on the type of 50 ohm feedline used. Feedline loss is directly proportional to length. I will address base station feedlines for VHF and UHF use in future training.