What If You Don't Have A Good Ground Plane? Do Ground Plane Kits Work? Use A Mobile Antenna At Home!

In this video I will present to you the solution for wanting to mount a

mobile

antenna

like this or even a larger one when you do not

have

a

good

ground

plane

to mount said

antenna

on a

ground

plane

for those who are not familiar with the term is not a plane parked on the ground, but a ground plane and very simple terms is a bunch of conductive material like steel or aluminum under your antenna. Strangers blow your antenna. This ground plane is necessary for certain types of antennas, such as

mobile

antennas. antennas and helps bounce all the RF electricity up into the sky so it can reach your friend's radio when you try to listen to

what

ever you are saying on your radio, usually the ground plane is simply the metal of your car on the one your antenna is mounted on and, contrary to

what

many of the experts online

have

to say, the ground plane does not have to be physically connected to your antenna, for example, if you use a magnetically mounted antenna, the electrical currents RF will ooze out easily. through the rubber coating and paint of the car and the antenna will couple with the metal to generate baby RF electricity also known as ground plane or if you are using a mobile antenna in the house we will also make a simple tray to bake cookies. a suitable ground plane as long as about three and a half inches or more of the metal extends outward around the antenna, so that would be three and a half inches for a gmrs radio if you are using a CB antenna because the frequencies are much lower. that gmrs you would need a much larger ground plane, but since no one uses Seabees anymore, no one cares about that, but what if you want to mount your mobile antenna in a corner of your vehicle with no metal or ground plane directly underneath? in life is mounting your gmrs antenna on the fiberglass roof of your Jeep or motor

home

or maybe you want to use a mobile antenna with a base station for your house nailed to a 2x4 in the attic with no ground plane underneath, my friend, in situations like these, where there is no proper ground plane, you will probably get a very high SWR and the antenna will not

work

to its full potential, which unfortunately will result in less distances and that is where this can come in very handy, a This is Nagoya's ground plane kit and Nagoya did not send me this.

I paid full price for this with money raised from members of my YouTube channel who support me. Those are the people who have stars and fancy icons next to their names when they leave comments so they stand out above all else. the other idiots and nobodies who leave comments and reached their highest status in life by clicking the join button or the link below in a ground plane kit, like in this Nagoya ground plane kit, you will find a bracket, some mounting clamps for the bracket and nmo. mounting which is removable with four curious holes drilled in it, you will find four 11 and a half inch long radials and four ten and a half inch long extensions.

These extensions lengthen the radials that join the end in this way and would be for use on much lower frequencies such as CB radio so you don't really need them for gmrs as mentioned above the radials are 11 and a half inches long long, but the radial on a ground plane only has to be a quarter of the wavelength of the frequencies you are transmitting at and for the gmrs range that would be about three and a half inches or so from each side of the antenna, but Longer, like everything in life is fine, the radials simply and easily screw to the base of the ground plane.

I'm not going to screw them all in because I'd be poking myself in the eye, but you would put all four of them in and they would point in all directions and as you can see the radials stick out flat, but the legend says that if you were to angle the radials down by bending them slightly to a angle of about 40 degrees, 42 degrees to be exact, that might improve the functionality of the ground plane, but depending on how and where you have mounted it, bending the radials into a downward position may not be possible, but the flat

work

s just as well. well enough in most cases.

I almost forget it. It also comes with this small Allen wrench and some small screws to hold the extensions mentioned above. You would put the extension in the hole and then use one of these to screw them in and tighten them, but as mentioned above in the gmrs world, we don't need those extensions. This kit was made to be mounted on a mast. You can then use the clamps to securely attach the bracket to the mast, but you can do this. Easily remove the bracket from the bracket and then you can mount just the upright without the bracket to something like the flat fiberglass roof of your Jeep or your RV if you are willing to drill a hole large enough through the roof to accommodate the upright or you.

You could leave everything on the bracket and easily mount it to a 2x4 in your attic or just nail it to the side of your house. The only limit to how or where you mount it is your imagination, but the burning question is whether this actually works. Can these little cables really replace something as substantial as a cookie sheet? To answer that question I set up my Midland phantom antenna with no ground plane on a plastic tripod and then measured the SWR using my gear expert antenna analyzer which I got from buy2a radios.com and as you can see with no ground plane I got a reading SWR of 4.4 to 1.

And ladies and gentlemen, that is not a

good

SWR reading, this means that if you were using a radio that produces 50 watts, only 36 watts. it could actually squirt out of the antenna, all those other watts would ooze into the radio causing excessive heat in the innards of the radio and potentially causing damage to those innards because guts and heat are not a good combination, so I added the radials from the ground plane to the mount which is what forms the ground plane for the antenna and I measured the SWR again and this time I got a reading of 1.94 to 1.

This means that if you were transmitting at 50 watts, 45 of those watts could be spurted out of the antenna and that not only means more RF electricity will be blasted into the air where you want it to be, it also means a lot less electricity will be oozing into the bowels of the radio, which, As mentioned above, it is never good, ladies and gentlemen, let me point out that an ROE of 1.94 to 1 is not a perfect ROE measurement, however, it is much better than the 4.4 to 1 ROE we saw with no ground plane and a SWR of 1.94 to 1.

It is perfectly acceptable to any normal person, don't let any experts try to tell you otherwise and as mentioned above you could even improve this SWR by bending the radials down by a angle up to 42 degrees, as you just witnessed. With your own skull-mounted ocular fluid sex, if you're struggling to get a good ground plane, using an inexpensive ground plane kit like this one from Nagoya or any other company could dramatically improve your life and the SWR of your antenna.