Over the summer an unexpected hailstorm did just enough damage to total my car. I had used a Diamond hatchback mount on it and had a NR72BNMO with it. It worked perfectly, the only drag was that the car was a stick shift so trying to talk into a mic and shift at the same time was a little too much. Ultimately I never got on the radio much.

Fast forward to now, and I decided to try a Bulletproof Diesel 3rd brake light mount. Certainly not ideal if you ask those looking for ham radio perfection, but I can get 2 NMO mounts on a very sturdy mount. Plus the new car has an automatic transmission, so in theory I can operate when mobile more often.

First things first: the product itself is solid. I’m about to talk in a second about the challenges it brought, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the mount itself. I got the version with the dual antenna mount, and to be honest the price is on the higher end, but the quality is worth it. It comes with 2 NMO mounts with coax from DX Engineering. The instructions are clear, the quality of the product is solid, and after I had it installed it felt sturdy. A great job by the teams that designed it and built it.

So on to the challenges. The antennas I used before were suited to being on the corner of the car. With this mount, it is about 1/3 from the edge of the car. It rendered my NR72BNMO useless on 2 meters, despite the mount being grounded. SWR was just above 2:1 across the 2 meter band. I tried the Compactenna that I have, and similar results with 2 meters and 220. That antenna wasn’t designed to be placed there.

I next tried my Comet UHV-6 next, and SWR for 6 meters, 2 meters, 70 centimeters were all solid. On 2 meters it is a 1/2 wave and a double-stacked 5/8 wave on 70 centimeters, so in other words, not picky about ground plane. 6 meters is a quarter wave, and had no issues with SWR below 2 across the band (I’ll get more specific metrics in a later post).

On the UHV-6, all HF bands with a coil are also a 1/4 wave. I put the 20 meter coil on top, and was able to get 14.074 to 1.2:1 SWR without issue. A quick FT8 session later, and I was having wild success with only 5 watts. 383 reception reports, and a DX contact with the Dominican Republic (HI8ML) in just under 2 hours.

So for some reason or another, 2 meters on a quarter-wave antenna doesn’t seem to like it, and the Compactenna doesn’t either. Everything else so far does. Next up, I’ll be trying more HF coils, a few hamsticks, and the NR73BNMO I have.