I've installed more CBs than I care to remember, since the late 1970s. I've been a ham radio operator since '77, building antennas for practically every band. Never have I encountered a WORSE antenna than this ProComm fiberglass 4' antenna! I bought this one for a flatbed truck that tows horse trailers. Put it up on the flatbed's roll bar on a flat 2" Firestick mount. I believe the Procomm antenna I received was too electrically short... as I started trimming, the SWR stayed so high it was pinning the meter, and it never came down! I ended up trimming a LOT more than could have possibly been required and still the SWR was impossibly high. It dawned on me that perhaps this antenna was too SHORT straight out of the box. Perhaps instead of trimming the darned thing, maybe I should have added a base extension or a tall spring to electrically lengthen the darned thing rather than trimming it.
Of course that's not the industry standard, but I bet it would have worked to bring the SWR down; but it was too late now, there was a pile of wire clippings on the ground, and what was left of this sorry antenna would be lucky to resonate on 6 meters. I'd wasted a couple of HOURS fooling with this stupid antenna, doubting my SWR bridge, so I tried a different one to use as a cross reference, and a third to check the other two. I tried a new run of coax and quadruple-tested everything. Nope, this antenna was just too far off right out of the box, and it never got any better. I grabbed an antenna from another truck in the yard and plunked it on the flatbed's mount and the SWR was fine. I had a Firestik FL-4 "Firefly" with adjustable tip on hand that was still new in the package (also from Right Channel Radio). I screwed it onto the mount, and the SWR was 1:2 out of the box! A little fine tuning and I easily got it to 1:1.2 on channel 19 in about a minute, and below 1:1.9 on every channel we use. Done. In a tiny fraction of the time I'd wasted (to no avail) on this lousy ProComm antenna. I'd much rather have just STARTED with the Firestik and been done in 10 minutes instead of blowing my whole afternoon with the aggravating ProComm antenna (that I never DID get to resonate on the CB band). I think I'll just keep trimming this awful ProComm antenna until I can get it to hit a useful band somewhere (maybe 6 meters or 2 meters). Save yourself the headache and a TON of time, and just get the adjustable tip Firestik FL-4! If I could have given the ProComm antenna negative stars, I would have. I figure I must have received a factory defect, because they wouldn't be in business if this is the kind of product they produce; if that's the case, then their quality control deserves one star!
