Deb has gotten past the aluminum locker door and is rolling again with the heat gun and I am trying to keep up with the adhesive removal and compounding. 

    

One of the guys, Jordan, from the graphics shop showed up today and put in about 3 hours with the “Eraser Tool” The tool is a 3M product (MMM 7498 - Stripe-Off Wheel) and it is magic!
 
On the really bad spots (most of the rig) where the sun has baked the graphics and adhesive on over the years, the eraser was much quicker than the scraper and heat gun. We hope we can keep Jordan on the job with the eraser and Deb and I can do adhesive removal and compounding.

In order to get at the graphics on the stern of the bus, I removed the rig the previous owner had attached to the ladder to mount his “trucker” CB antennas.

                                                     

I had mounted our backup camera on this rig, so I will be moving the camera up under the center marker light. It should give us a better angle of view from there. I am going to get rid of the “Trucker” duel antennas and put a small CB antenna where the old cell phone antenna used to be up front.

Dual antennas - looks aren't everything

There is a lot of misinformation floating around about dual antennas and their purpose or performance.
The place you normally see dual antennas is on the big rigs. The antennas are normally mounted on the mirrors on either side of the truck. The reason large trucks use this configuration is because the size and shape of the cab and/or trailer would block the signal of one antenna mounted on one side of the truck. The dual antennas create an effective way for large trucks to radiate a signal on both sides of their vehicle. This type of configuration also creates a front-to-back type of radiating pattern so that signal is emphasized to the front and the back of the truck which in the case of a trucker traveling down a long highway is a good thing.

To achieve the best radiating pattern dual antennas should be placed a 1/2 wave apart. That's about 204 inches apart. The average width of a tractor/trailer is 102" which doesn't come close to meeting the proper spacing but because of their specific problems a dual antenna setup can be effective.

On a smaller truck, just because it isn't wide enough doesn't mean that dual antennas won't work. A dual antenna setup can work just fine for most people, BUT the most common problem is that people opt to run a dual antenna setup with small antennas on each side to compliment the vehicle's looks and not the CB radio performance. Later they complain that their signal only goes a mile or two and they don't realize that they have severely limited their ability to transmit by installing short fiberglass whips.
A Wilson 1000 magnetic mount antenna on top of the cab - or even a 102" whip placed somewhere on the rear of the truck will most likely give better receive and transmit performance.

In most cases people who put dual antennas on their trucks or 4x4's do so because they like the "look" of the dual antennas. Often people with dual antennas do not even have a CB radio inside their truck.

Some people want to have the dual antenna "look" without the problems of tuning and running a dual antenna system. In this case it's very easy to make one antenna a "real" antenna and not run any coax to the other one.

Stations are located all around you and therefore the best type of antenna system is the one that provides the best receive and transmit in all directions which is a single antenna placed as high as possible on the vehicle.

The longer the antenna the better. A single 102" antenna will provide better performance than two 3' antennas.  If you do decide to run dual antennas I would suggest that each antenna be at least 4' or longer. The best performance I've seen is a full size antenna directly on top of the vehicle.

So the question is, do you want a balanced look for your vehicle; or balanced operation for your CB radio?

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