Perfect Places to Mount your CB or HAM Radio Antenna

While a cell phone is a great thing to have while out on the trail, it loses its use once you go deep into the woods, desert, or high up on the mountains, where towers no longer reach. This is where having a more powerful and useful CB or HAM radio comes in handy, as you can not only talk to your trail buddies, but you can also communicate with emergency frequencies, should the situation require it.

It’s not enough to just have a CB or HAM though, you also need to mount your antenna in a place that fits in your garage and allows your radio systems to live without interference. Let’s take a look at some of the places that our expert member, realjeep from Tijeras, New Mexico, recommends and some details as to why he prefers each spot.

Once you have a long enough antenna for your situation, you now need to mount it to your JK. There are several good spots around your Wrangler that will work, but the one place you should never mount it, if possible, is between the tail gate and spare tire. The most obvious reason you shouldn’t is because you’ll have a hard time opening the rear window or even using the tailgate. However, the real reason is that this position will reflect the radio waves back into the system, causing damage to the power amplifier in the radio.

“Think of a nuclear bomb going off the gamma rays can’t pass through 1 inch of lead or 10 feet of concrete and in our case of two-way radio signals the tailgate and spare tire are acting like a sandwich keeping our radiation inside and not allowing it to escape,” says realjeep.

The absolute best place to mount your antenna is the roof. However, you run into a unique issue with Jeeps, seeing as they don’t really have a permanent one. If you don’t ever plan to remove your hard top, you still run into another issue with it being made of fiberglass.

If you don’t ever remove the top and you can get a large piece of metal under the roof, you can place an antenna there. You could still get away without a large piece of metal by using a no-ground-plane antenna. Though normally you want a large ground plane under the antenna, these specialized antennas do away with that requirement and will work.

If you park in a garage or in a covered spot or want a good spot, then you can place your antenna on the cowl and possibly avoid drilling holes in the body of your Wrangler. However, when you mount your cowl antenna or need more than one and have to mount it near your stereo antenna, be sure that it is not 150-megahertz or it will cause radio noise as you’re listening to your favorite station.

The next good spot is one of the rear corners of the Wrangler. This is a great option as it will get the antenna over the body metal line and the radio waves will flow around the pillars and roll cage bars. If you have a rear light bar, you could use that to mount your antenna to the rear as well.

You see it a lot on those Jeeps that want to look “military,” but mounting on the rear bumper isn’t great, as you’ll have the JK’s body in the way of the radio waves. The license plate mount would have a similar problem too, so avoid it if you can.

All three non-roof options present a similar problem: When the ground plane isn’t even, your radio radiation patterns are not even. For most people, this won’t pose as an absolute problem, but as you get away from the person you are trying to communicate with, you’ll see where you lose connection the fastest.

You’ll also want to avoid on-glass antennas as they don’t have a good ground plane and reflect power back to the antenna. A dual purpose antenna that allows you to use your head unit’s antenna as a VHF antenna with a splitter box isn’t great, either. Magnetic antennas are great for a temporary use when attached to good, solid metal, but, since most of the time the coaxial cable is run between a door or a window, it gets damaged and becomes useless.

Be sure to check out the entire thread as it contains some great information on how these antennas work and more!

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