I recently started toying with the idea of operating mobile.  After doing a lot of research online it seems the absolute best way to do this is to drill a hole and have a NMO mount installed.  Knowing this I started thinking about buying a 2nd vehicle just for this purpose.  The car I have now I purchased new at the end of 2012 and it didn’t seem right to do this as I was concerned with water leaks or rusting.  It turns out that a couple of shops around me that specialize in 2-way radio will install a NMO mount for reasonable price.  Where I’m not willing to try on my own, I am willing to defer to the experts.  I decided having a shop that specializes in this would be the way to go.

Before doing this however I decided it would be a good idea to do a prototype and see how things worked. Before committing to drilling a hole in my car I wanted to know it would be worthwhile. I bought a 5-inch mag mount and several of the MFJ hamsticks.  W5TOM’s website was extremely helpful in understanding what would work for this.  I put a the 20 meter antenna on the mag mount and hooked it up to my analyzer. (Keep in mind I was operating parked.  I do not recommend a hamstick on a mag-mount while driving!) With nothing grounded but the mag mount it was resonant around 13.5 MHz, and at 14.074 it was in the 3.5:1 range for SWR.   I hooked up my tuner and very crudely hooked up a ground strap.  It was placed between a piece of plastic and the metal hook that the back hatch latches to.  The plastic held it in place.  With the tuner I was able to get everything in tune, and I hooked up my rig and my laptop to try some FT8.

What happened next blew my mind.  I was at a local park where there isn’t any electricity and so there wouldn’t be the high noise floor I’m used to.  I figured I would probably need to adjust the antenna since it had such a high SWR and mag mount and all that, but I figured let’s see what happens first.  There was no noise floor, and before I knew it I had over 20 contacts and had added 3 countries to my list (Brazil, Argentina, and the Canary Islands).  This blew my mind, I have a park not far from my place that I can get to most of the year, and with a far less than ideal antenna setup I just worked the world.  The only limiting factor was my laptop and gel batteries, but I got over 2 hours of non-stop FT8.

Knowing this, the NMO mount is happening.  I am going to contact a couple of shops around the Twin Cities and see what prices are.  I’ve been looking at what mounting options to use and I’m excited to get it installed.  I can’t wait to have a permanent install in my car.