I'm heading off on a group thing and the rules are I need to have a CB. Not wanting a CB I opted for the Cobra C75WXST because its smaller and can be easily removed. After a quick google I found that everyone installed them in the same place - under the glove box, with the connector poking in to the passenger section. So I did that.
WTF? You can't all be happy with that stupid connector just hanging there?
I purchased an aviator waterproof 5 DIN male / female from Amazon and in a little over an hour of cutting, soldering, and Sugra-ing, I'd extended the supplied cable to reach in to a better part of the dash, added a quick disconnect so I can easily remove it, and patched the original hole. This thing is now installed like a grown up. No hanging wires. No fiddly screw connectors. And as a bonus, has a dust cap.
I completely agree with you. I really don't want a CB in my truck but I'm doing the Cal4Wheel Winter Fun Festival at the end of Jan and it's in their trail rules for night offroading.
So is carrying snow chains. I've never needed them in my life. They're costing me a fortune in junk I'll never use.
This is not a CB radio, it is a 10M amateur radio. Modifying it to work on CB (11M) is illegal. Not that anybody will care, as long as you never transmit on 10M (unless you have a General or Extra class Ham license). But the mod is also pointless except for bragging rights. The receiver section is no better than any CB and worse than many. So what if you can transmit at (illegal) 10W if you can't hear normal CB'ers replies?
As for the 75WXST, Cobra essentially took a walkie-talkie design, lopped-off the battery compartment and routed the antenna, external speaker jack and power jack through the mic cable to an interface box you mount remotely. Pretty nifty in terms of a clean install, but it still suffers from the same inherent problem as a hand-held; limited space inside the radio to dissipate heat from the final power transistor. And that is going to limit your output power due to manufacturer's tuning-down the radio to prevent overheating. Even the small Uniden radios have around 10X better heat dissipation.
Most CB radios can be peaked and tuned by a CB shop for $50-100 to put out the maximum legal power, even those $40 Uniden 520XL's. Get a 4' Firestick or Wilson antenna, mount it so it sticks up higher than your roof line, make sure the antenna is grounded well to your chassis, and use good quality coax to wire it up. Finish off by adjusting the SWR as tight as possible and you'll have great transmit AND RECEIVE improvement over 99% of the setups out there.
I'm an Extra Class Ham, but I also have a CB in the jeep. I don't want much power with the CB because I have no interest in talking farther than the group I'm wheeling with. On the other hand I don't want to encourage people that don't wish to put forth a little effort and $15 for a ham license to use one with out a license.
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