On Thursday, January 30, 2014 2:03:04 PM UTC-6, Ralph Mowery wrote:

The antennas you have to start with are almost the opposit of what you want

to do. The ones you have are physically too short to be a 1/4 wave on the

low bands and need lots of wire to make up the differance. When used on 2

meters and above it is easy to go over 1/4 wave and still mout them on a

car. You may get some gain by doing this. To use the whips that have wire

wrapped around it for several feet on 2 meters, you will need to strip off

all the old wire and just run a single wire up the whip and put just a few

turns around the bottom to match it.



Always fun to expirment with what you have.

The glass whips do make a handy platform which is light.
All of my HF mobile antennas are plastic bugcatchers built
from various fire sticks, ham sticks, etc.
My main version is center loaded and 11 ft tall counting
the 5 ft whip attached to the 6 ft glass stick. When parked,
I can also add a solid 3 ft hustler mast below the glass stick
to raise the coil level to 8 ft, and a total of 14 ft tall.
Works all bands 80-10, and on the higher bands, I use
shorter "stinger" whips with the coil bypassed with a
jumper.
What is handy is I get bugcatcher performance with a much
lower weight, which makes it a lot easier to mount and use.

I've built the exact 2m 5/8 whip that I earlier described using a
glass whip. and is still around somewhere.. If I can find it,
it would tell me exactly how many turns the loading coil was on
the one I built. I remember on mine, the glass whip was a tad
bit short, and I had to add a short stinger to the top to get the
full 5/8 wave. I used it on the back of a Honda Accord for a
while.. I've still been too chicken to drill any holes in my
newer Toyota, and haven't run any radios from it yet.
If I want to run mobile, I have to use one of my old trucks. :|