Stegall984R

Im stuck.... ive checked and REcheck every thing, and w/o tuning my firestick at all, the SWR is 3 or more on ALL channels...

heres my setup..

4' fire stik on front bumper same place as TJM mounts
18 ' premium coax
Radio Shack TRC521 radio...

cant figure it out guys. any help would be much apperchaited.

4Hummer

Antena grounding out maybe ?

Stegall984R

already checked that. theres no contuninity between the car and teh antenna

TStango

Make sure you grind/sand down the paint underneath the mounting tab on the TJM so that the firestick mount is getting a good ground. Did you solder the ends onto the wire yourself? There is alot of troubleshooting info on the Firestick website too, so check that out.

Stegall984R

no its mounted on the STOCK bumper, but in the same location as teh TJM, passanger front corner. I know the bumper is grounded good becuase my lights are grounded to it and they work perfect

ive read every thing there is to read on the fire stik site.

WATRD

The antenna could be defective, you could have water in the coax or you could have a shorted connector.

Rig it up with another chunk of coax and see if that cures it. If not, try another antenna.

Stegall984R

Fixed it....

my own stupidity.

I got a FireStik, insted of a FireStik 2 and to tuent eh first one, u have to uncoil some of the wire at the top of it...

well after hooking it all up and the SWR reading off the charts, I didnt have enough sence to think to my self " you know, they probably made it way to long since it has to be tuned this way "

Started cliping off wire little by little, swr came down, and i was able to tune it to the following :

1.5 on channel 1
1.4 on channel 19
1.5 on channel 40


that sound good ?

I spent 3 hours trying to figure out why the antenna wasnt grounded correctly, and it only took 5 mins to tune the damn thing once i thought about my problem a little.

DUH !!!!

WATRD

Doh!

1.5 and below is quite tolerable and often as good as you are going to get.