On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 13:14:02 -0500, wrotF:

I live in a metal sided house and am rural too. I don't get anything
on my scanner, and when something does come in, all I get is noise.
I need an outdoor antenna but dont want to spend any money on this.
I have a dozen or more old CB antennas. The coax from one of them
will directly attach to the scanner.

My question is how to modify the antenna to get the correct wave
length. What length do I need to cut it to, (or add some on) Does
anyone have any info?

PS. These are all car type CB antennas. I realize this wont be a
perfect antenna, and a commercial one would be better, but anything is
better than what I got now. My neighbor gets all kinds of reception,
just with the telescoping antenna on the back of the radio, but he is
in a plastic sided house. So, just getting something outdoors will
help me.

Thanks

Mark
If the CB antenna is center loaded or top loaded it should work
reasonably well. If it is base loaded it probably won't.

I used to use one of the cheap magnet mount center loaded CB antennas
as a mobile scanner antenna and it worked quite well on VHF Hi and
UHF. I also tried one of the base loaded types and that was like
shorted coax.

There are lots of antennas you can build for next to nothing, just do
a google search.