Installed the Midland MXT500 GMRS radio and their Ghost 3db antenna

[steelponycowboy]

Well I do agree that I also would never use or recommend a Ghost antenna BUT people buy it because #1 it's a best seller and #2 because since it's small it won't attract attention. Personally o prefer a Bull Bar on the front or rear of my Gladiator or Midlands Grand Vista on the back of my Wrangler.

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[David G]

Many if not most people mount the ghost antenna on a bracket that sticks out between the front fender and hood at the side of the cowl placing the antenna nearly 6" below hood line. That will severally distort the radiation pattern and there is no ground plane under the antenna and all of that adds up to poor performance and limited range. But some still do ok with that setup. I always recommend a high quality commercial brand (not Midland) of NMO trunk lip mount on the hood near a hood hinge on a Gladiator. Its a proven good spot.

Personally I would never recommend a ghost antenna as its worse performing than a 6" tall thin flexible 1/4 wave whip at UHF and the whip is a lot more durable. I've done actual antenna range testing with a directional wide band log periodic source antenna pointed at the antennas under test recording precise differences in gain on a Vector Network Analyzer using my Gladiator Mojave as the test bed comparing most of the commercial tri-band police/public service antennas on the market today plus a few ham antennas. A trunk lip mount on the Gladiator hood near the hood hinges performs a little better than the same antenna on most trunk lids, partially because the upper part of a Gladiator is fiberglass and doesn't block much at radio frequencies. The hood is also much larger than most trunk lids providing a good ground plane.

I've done some experimenting with sheet metal and a mag mount on my Gladiator roof and with a temporary mount on my roof level bed rack and getting the antenna up at roof level is noticeably better, but not practical for many Gladiator owners. Its a lot of work to provide a ground plane up there and a bed rack by itself does not have enough flat surface area to provide a good ground plane in most cases. Its better at UHF but for those installing a CB or 2m amateur rig those antennas need much more ground plane than a couple inch wide horizontal bar of metal on a typical bed rack can provide. Bottom line is yes we can do better antenna on a Gladiator than the hood but its not within the scope of what most owners can or are willing to do.

I own several repeaters on hill tops and mountain tops and am constantly range testing antennas at a distance and comparing them and also to friends setups with roof mount, trunk lid mount and many other mounting locations. My hood mounted Gladiator antenna hangs in there with the best of my friends setups with their antennas mounted in more favorable locations. From one of the repeaters at my house on the side of a hill at about 350ft HAAT, I can get out to about 75 to 80mi at UHF before things finally fizz out. That kind of range from an antenna mounted about 15ft off the ground is noteworthy. Talking from my Gladiator to other repeater sites on mountain tops I have not yet found the maximum range in some directions as I haven't driven far enough, but its well in excess of 100mi on both VHF and UHF.

My typical setup for GMRS is a Harris XG-100M radio into various VHF/UHF/700/800 multiband antennas which are all 1/4 wave equivalent on all bands including the Larsen Tri-band, PCTEL BMAXSCAN1000, Tram 8079 and a couple others from Sti-Co and Comtel. (I change some antennas as often as I change my socks). For 2/70cm amateur I use a Yaesu FTM-400DR into a dual band Larsen NMO2/70B, both hood mounted. BTW, the Larsen NMO 2/70B is a really big, good performing antenna no matter what you stick it on. My Gladiator is one of many vehicles I've used as an antenna testbed with most others having permanent roof mounts with lots of flat ground plane available. The Gladiator hood works surprisingly well compared to some of my previous setups. I'm all for the very best performance I can squeeze out of an installation and I've done some pretty insane things to get there but I'm happy enough with my two top of hood mounted antennas to be satisfied at the moment.

I might add that antennas have been a focus for most of my employment over the last 50yrs and at one point I was the range master for an indoor antenna/RCS range for the largest aerospace company in the US at the time. Part of my job was performing antenna gain and pattern measurements and radar cross section analysis for in house and external customers, most of which I can't discuss. What I'm trying to convey here is I like antennas and I get along really well with them.

With respect to Hood Mounts, I have a few Diamond K400 S/C NMO mounts and they are fabulous.

However, I recently installed a radio on my new Gladiator and used an RG 58 /NMO cable that I purchased from Amazon. I attached the cable to a driver side mount that screws in behind the hood And ran wires through the firewall.

I cut my 1/2 wave No Ground Plane antennas (for 2 GMRS and 1 VHF) to size and the SWR results were not satisfactory. The best That I could get was 2.11 SWR for VHF. One GMRS (B4505 Laird) was very good for simplex and duplex. The short Rugged Radios 1/2 wave NGP GMRS antenna was 1.02 on simplex and over 1.5 on duplex. Consequently, time to change the set up. I then attached the Diamond Mount to the hood and the results were perfect. I was pleasantly surprised. The VHF SWR came down to 1.32 using the same length. GMRS readings were 1.01 for duplex and simplex... Perfect.

I can only presume the difference in performance is based on the quality of materials.… your thoughts?
BTW, I do not coil up my antenna wire. I was a bit frustrated as I could have just installed the Diamond Mount. I just didn’t want to attach to the hood.