This write-up is three parts. Scroll down to the second part for the final (as of 3/24/12) install. Part 1 is my quick, thrown together install for my trip home with the truck. Part 3 has some of my comments regarding the operability of this mobile station.

The new truck is a 2011 F-350 crew cab long bed with the 6.7L diesel (all in-house FORD this time!!!) and it has the King Ranch package. What I was after is a diesel Super Duty that had Navigation and NO MOON ROOF. For those that know the story you can guess as to the reasoning behind not wanting a moon roof… The way Ford packages the Navigation systems starting off in 2011 for the new generation is it is included in their Lariat Ultimate package. The moon roof, and a few other goodies, are also part of that package. In this part of the country dealers do not order trucks with navigation without the Lariat Ultimate package. I looked all over the place, I even had dealers trying to locate one for me, and couldn’t find one that was close enough to what I was looking for. As a result, I was going to order one the way I wanted it but at the time I was going to place my order the 2011 model year was all run out of Navigation systems. The Navigation system is key feature that I wanted as I had it in my 2010.

Long story short, I had to find one already built with the options I was after (and without the ones I didn’t want). I found the truck I have at a dealer in Texas. I jumped on an airplane and flew down, stayed with a great friend that moved down there several years back, got the truck, and drove 1300 miles home with it. It may have been a bit more of a wild adventure than I was after but I’m glad I did it. I took off Friday night and left with the truck shortly after noon (central) Saturday, then pretty much drove straight until I had to stop and rest. I made it back home Sunday evening and managed to get to work at 8AM Monday morning! Well, I was there physically…

On to the radio install.

Part 1

I had made a custom switch panel for my 2010 truck. This was built out of the stock coin holder panel. I cut out the coin holder part and put a flat plate across the front with switches and jacks on it. The new truck came with the Upfitter switch option. Luckily, the dash hasn’t changed enough to make my panel unusable and it fit right in the same spot as the Upfitter switches. This panel is the base for much of the new installation as so much is wired up through it.

Current setup:

I will throw out there that I packed all of my radio gear and tools in to a big Pelican case and flew it down to Texas with me. My intent was to get the main wiring in to the truck for the road trip home. It ended up working, sort of…

Before I left for the trip I made a wiring harness with all the key cables for my FT-857D. These include: power, remote face plate, mic extension, and audio. I wrapped them all up in a split loom and sectioned them off so they were all laid out nice. The hard part about this was I just guessed at it. I figured once I got the truck I could adjust it. My intent was also to lay this harness in the factory wiring channel right next to the door opening on the floor.

This was too much work when I was down South (and, mind you, the temperature was pushing 100 degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky). So I just laid the harness in the cab and did away with the hard install.

My HF antenna for the trip home was a whip and an LDG Z-11Pro tuner. I had some extra wire with me and was able to rig it up to work. I grounded the tuner to  one of the tie down hooks in the rear of the bed. However, the whip didn’t work real well overall – I was getting a good bit of noise in the radio.

The dual band antenna was going to be a Commet SBB-5 on a heavy duty lip mount on the hood. However, I forgot a tool and wasn’t able to get the mount to work. Luckily I threw in my spare Commet M-24M antenna and magnet mount. So I put it on the roof and used that for the whole trip.

The radio install for the trip home wasn’t very effective on HF. I listened to the radio the whole time as I was getting RF back in the mic and had some noise issues. I was able to listen to the CB band also, that helped a bunch as I found myself in several traffic jams.

Part 2 – full installation

Again, I used what I learned in installing and uninstalling my radio setup in my 2010 truck. The raw 2011 cab is the same, just with a few styling changes. The wiring channels and pass-throughs are the same.

The first of the changes I made is that I ran my power wires and coax through rubber plugs/grommets the right way, and sealed them. In my 2010 truck I used the boot around the main wiring harness that goes between the engine compartment and the cab (under the steering wheel). I ran the wire through the “side”, not actually “through”. This time around I pulled up the drivers side carpet and that allowed access to a few plugs/grommets to use.

This is what I decided to use – the plug over the access hole for the body/frame bolt:

Note that the hole I cut in the plug and ran the wires through is sealed with CoaxSeal and electrical tape (3M Super 33+, the only kind of tape to use for this stuff).

The bigger black wire is the coax going to the VHF/UHF antenna on the hood. The orange wire/fuse holder and small black wire is the supply for my dash panel.

The split loom the wire all passes through is only through the engine compartment and where you see it here. It is too thick to run along the wiring channel so it is just the bare wires from where you see it stop there through to the back of the cab.

The remote wires for the face plate and mic also pass through the wiring channels. The mic line runs up the passenger side through to the dash and the faceplate line runs up the drivers side, then crosses under the drivers seat to the console. The only place that the wire is exposed is under the right side of the drivers seat between the floor vent and right frame:

To hide that wire under the carpet the whole way would have required removal of the seat. I’m not going to worry about it that much.

The next topic is the coax for the HF antenna. This will exit the rear of the cab. The initial installation was LMR-240 UltraFlex, but it has since been replaced with Heliax LDF1-50A – a bit bigger diameter but it has a solid shield and better performance than LMR-400, though smaller.

There are a couple grommets/plugs in the rear of the cab towards the bottom. You can see them from under the truck looking at the back of the cab:

To get access to the inside of that hole you have to pull back the rear liner panel.

The hole in the cab is JUST big enough to pass a PL-259 through without the grommet in there.

I cut an X pattern in the grommet and stretched it over the PL-259.

After I slid the grommet down the cable I positioned it where I needed it and sealed it. Again, CoaxSeal and 3M Super 33+ tape.

In the past, actually going back to about 10 years, I’ve been using a Tarheel model 200 screwdriver antenna. The screwdriver antennas work very well, from a useability standpoint. The reason being is you can remotely tune them and they are multi-band. I will throw out there that the efficiency once you get to the lower bands starts dropping off pretty quick but I do think that having a tunable antenna is more of a convenience than is the loss in efficiency. My model 200 antenna was going to make its way back on to the new truck but I decided to replace it with a new model 400. I backed in to a tree while landscaping and broke the model 200 off one of my previous trucks so I was going to have to do some repairs before I could get it to mount up to the new truck. I will save that project for making an attic antenna for base use.

I went through a couple mounts for the Tarheel Model 400, but they are the same idea. Here is the final product:

The doughnut looking thing is a choke – 5 wraps of coax. Whether it is warranted or not I used it. I do this with my whip/tuner antennas to keep RF off the coax. I’ve had issues with that in the past – stray RF likes to do weird things in the cab (dashboard, radio flickering, RF in the mic, etc). The screwdriver antenna is a (mostly) resonant antenna so in theory the choke isn’t needed.

Also note the coax is in split loom and everything is sealed up well (even the ground braid to keep it from corroding).

This mount is one of the coolest things about this install. For the many years I had my Silverado I used this same style mount, but the hitch receiver had a round tube on the side. I used a pin to hold the antenna mount in so I could disconnect it pretty easy (never mind the ground, coax, and control cables – that was another issue).  What I disliked about that mount was it was always “loose”. The antenna would rattle a bit and the mount would shake when I hit a pot hole or speed bump.

So this time around I took a different approach. The mount is bolted to the side of the receiver, but what makes it unique is the bolts only pass through one side and there is no nut to worry about holding a tool on. The mount is so strong that the whole rear end of the truck (a 1 ton truck) will move around before any of the antenna mount remotely starts to flex.

The trick? Weld nuts to the inside of the mount:

Note that the nuts are a bit oval – these are lock nuts. I didn’t want to have to worry about split washers or star washers, so I used some nice lock nuts. I also didn’t weld the whole nut, just a bit as I didn’t want to get them too hot. When they were tacked in place I had a bolt in there and tightened down. The tight bolt kept the nut firm on the plate (wouldn’t warp as the temperature changed) and the extra metal helped to sink the heat.

Before the plate was welded back in place I chamfered the edges with a grinder. The blade I cut the plate out with is about 3/32″, so there was that much kerf plus the chamfer to fill when I welded it. This worked out perfect – I got full penetration through the whole plate.

Note that the round bar passes through both the top and bottom of the square tube. I used a hole saw to make the holes then welded the tube in on the top and bottom.

Once I got the mount fabricated I took it to a local powder coat company, Performance Powdercoat. They did a real nice job:

I decided to cap off the tube because it would have been too difficult to get paint through there.

Part 3

How does this set up work? Pretty good! It is definitely the nicest HF mobile installation I’ve ever done. The only change I would make (and will at some point) is to re-work my face plate mount so it is a hard install, not the cup holder thingy. Although, on my long hauls having the cup holder mount is nice because I can move it anywhere I want when I’m not driving – throw my headphones on, tune out, and work HF – even in the back seat.

The Tarheel Model 400 is a real nice antenna. I wasn’t too thrilled with the narrow bandwidth and fast tuning at first. The Pittman motor is faster than the old Model 200 I have. The catch to the Model 400 is that it covers all the way through 160 meters. This means the coil is a lot “tighter”. Combine the tight coil with the fast motor and the tuning is MUCH faster than the 200. In reality, the fast tuning is nice because I can navigate from working DX on 17 meters down to the MIDCARS net on 40, and back the other way in seconds. Navigating band edges is as easy as clicking the switch up or down to nudge the SWR dip where I need it.

The switch on my dash panel to the left of the mic and key jacks (middle of the panel) is a momentary DPDT switch for tuning the antenna. This works out real nice! The antenna came with a switch box, but I wanted everything to be together there on the dash – switches and jacks. I have been real happy with this set up.

Noise level -

The noise level is really quite manageable. There is more noise picked up from power lines and other things than what the truck creates. I did bond the bed and cab together, as well as the exhaust pipe to the frame (across the last hanger mount in the rear). Grounding like this is very important to any mobile HF installation.

Switch panel -

The 4 switches on the left on the panel are all 12v accessory switches. I have 3 of them in use. One is for lights in the bed, another one is an accessory line run to the bed (low amp – for a beacon light or light 12v use), and the third is the on/off switch for an air compressor that runs my shocks (not load-leveler type air springs, the Rancho MyRide system). The fourth switch has yet to find a use, but its there when I do find one.

Part 4

My next installation:

Cheap inverters don’t run service monitors. This Xantrex Prowatt SW 1000 isn’t top of the line either, but so far its made my service monitor pretty happy. I need to take a noise floor reading with the spectrum analyzer on the inverter and commercial power. Stay tuned, it may not be real soon but when I get a chance I’ll do another write-up.

Aurora opening EN39 June VHF QSO Party 2009 – SSB

Aurora opening EN39 June VHF QSO Party 2009 – CW

The story behind these videos is I was working the June VHF QSO Party (one of the biggest VHF contests, if not THE biggest, of the year). Obviously I was trying to rack up as many contacts as I could during the contest period. I heard a 0 station calling and tracked his grid square to central Minnesota. Now, from where I was up in Canada he was DUE SOUTH of me. So I hit the rotator and put my antennas due south. The crazy part – his signal was GONE. NADA. Nothing. I thought I just went crazy. So I re-checked my findings and spun the antennas back around where they were before. His signal came back. Well, I sat there and let the antennas go around more.

Guess where his signal strength peaked?

His strength peaked OVER S9 with the antennas DUE NORTH!

OK, so how can that be? I know the location of the station I am listening to is due south of my QTH but I can’t hear them with my antennas due south… yet when the antennas are due north I can? I’ve never heard anything like this before, or since.

I am an avid VHF’er. During this same contest I worked a west coast station AND an east coast station, back to back in the log, and more surprising – they were both on the same frequency. I pointed one direction and got the one guy then spun the antennas 180deg and got the other guy. Pretty cool!

This is the kind of stuff that really intrigues me with Ham radio. Its awesome – in the most literal sense of the word.

I have received several QSL requests from my trip to EN39. If you are reading this and have not received a QSL card yet DON’T WORRY! Any QSL request I have received with an SASE will be returned.

I am re-configuring my card. In the past I have made a card unique to the trip in which the contact was made. I have decided to bulk-order cards this round so I don’t have to worry about making them any more. This will be a more “generic” card than in years past.

As of this writing (29 July 2011) I am just about ready to send out the file for a proof print. If all is good I will go ahead and have the bulk order run. Once I receive the cards I will fill them out and send them according to the cards/SASE’s I have received.
Thanks for your patience!

If you are yet to send a card/SASE – I am good on QRZ. I look forward to confirming our QSO, provided I have logged the contact.

EDIT:

I received my order of cards 9/1/11! I spent an hour or so filling out cards this evening and will begin sending them out tomorrow 9/2/11. Thank you for your patience!

I am in the process of making a new mount for my screwdriver antenna and I need a better face plate mount. When I get the last two items done I will post up. In the mean time I will start the process (LONG process) of typing the post.

MVI_8335

If you didn’t find the video link above already – click on it.

I’ve used Pelican cases now for a couple years and they’re GREAT! I’d say this one loaded up weighs between 80 and 100lbs and I bet I could still sit on it with it floating.  We were packing up the boat heading home from my Canada trip and I couldn’t resist throwing it all in the lake.

Please see my last trip report (combined with Field Day) back in 2009. There are also a couple reports I did – Operation “Red Buoy” and Operation “Red Buoy 2″ while I was there. I will have to get there and see if the “red buoy” is still my internet hotspot. If not, no worries. I’ll just rough it for a few days.

In past years I have run all 3 bands - 6m, 2m, and 70cm. However, the bulk of my contacts has always been on 6m so this year I am simplifying things and just running 6m. I will also have some HF gear, but in terms of VHF I will be pretty much confined to 6m this trip.

This years trip will be July 2-10, and having a radio on the air from the 3-9 as I have time. You can catch me on the following frequency ranges:

SSB – 50.125 to 50.150, unless the band is crowded I may creep up to 50.200

CW – 50.080 to 50.100

PLEASE pass this along to anyone and everyone that has some VHF interest. I always enjoy the pile ups.  

See you on the band!

Topic 1:

There is an absolutely FANTASTIC article in the “Getting on the Air” section of QST called “Feeding a Balanced Antenna with Coax Cable”. I have talked so much in the past on balanced vs. unbalanced feed lines, tuners, and baluns. This article is one of the better ones I have read – and I learned a bit myself as well.

One thing is for sure with Ham radio – you can never learn everything. There are so many “big pictures” to be broken down in to the puzzle pieces that are the makeup of those pictures that learning is a never ending process. A great place to start understanding feed lines, balanced antennas, and baluns is page 61 in the January 2011 QST. It doesn’t tell you everything, but from everything else I have learned this article brings in a whole bunch of puzzle pieces for a pretty good overview in understanding what is going on by using the classic dipole-fed-with-coax model (haven’t we all see enough of that example? NOPE!).

Topic 2:

Bringing up one of the inherent problems with getting newcomers in to the Ham radio world, Eric KL7AJ depicts an interesting approach to snagging the interest, and holding it, in his article “Put the Mad Scientist Back Into Ham Radio.” A note-worthy idea Eric presents is to “scare” people, lets think the younger generations here, in to getting some excitement out of Ham radio. As Eric puts it as the article begins – “In our day, it was our job to create emergencies. The new EmComm oriented hams are intent on “fixing” emergencies”.

Within the context of the article – when was the last time something “bad” happened in an “experiment”? I, for one, have ”let the magic smoke out” of a few things – one of which being the multi-meter I blew up with over 1000 volts. All those experiments lead to a more thorough understanding, and when one goes awry I ask the question “why” and try to reason what I can to fixing the problem, or better yet – preventing it. What better experience than to experience it? Of course, there are lines that should never be crossed (IE, be careful and don’t do things that are really dumb where you will most certainly be hurt or killed).

In addition to Eric’s perspective a lot of what I think about in relation to Ham radio is why things work to begin with. Most of what I get myself in to doesn’t have much risk, let alone a problem to begin with. I don’t need that risk to experience thrill. My thrill is connecting the many dots of theories and knowledge to paint a picture. I seem to find myself lost in scattered dots, and segments, so the more connections I can bridge to tie more of the dots and segments together the better off I feel. The icing on the cake is bridging a connection and making something actually work.

This brings me up to topic 3:

An interesting perspective I have on the world today is the lack of understanding, or care of understanding, that seemingly a lot of people possess.

One quote I have and use, and you may have seen it posted other places, is:

 ”To truly solve a problem you must first understand the problem.”

OK, so lets break it down. Identify the problem. What is the problem? Something that isn’t happening or doing what it is supposed to. So what are the causes? Here is where most people stop.

How are the causes of a problem resolved? Well, you have to understand them to know. That brings me to the key to my 3ord topic – one must ask the question “why”.

To truly solve a problem you must first understand the problem. Can you see how many ways a problem can be broken down? Think of a connect-the-dots session shaped like a pyramid – made out of lines and dots that arrive at the top to a singular point, or should I say, the “main idea” or “big picture”. This is an identical model to the composition of a problem solution. Starting at the base, and you can dig as deep as you want here to as many details as you want, you find every singular component of the workings of something. As you move up the “pyramid” you combine the segments of the workings of other bigger details and you eventually understand the major components/functionality of something.

Most people start at the top of that pyramid and burn out as they try to work down, some never jump past a level or two. Again, the key component here is the “why” question. It leads to endless segmenting.

This is all just a big process, or model. As weird as you may see me being, I love the question “why”. If something sparks my interest and I have a desire to understand something, even if there is no problem to begin with, I will ask “why” until I satisfy myself. Well, sometimes I don’t satisfy myself – I just build some clusters of segments and store them away to tap later.

Getting back to electronics, Ham radio, and the modern world - the greatest gift Ham radio has given me, and for which I am so engrossed in it, is it is a perfect environment to grow clusters of how things work. Go to a university and, not that there aren’t any, find the engineering students that have a medium, of some type, to apply what it is that they are learning, or have “learned”. How many people can you find? What is their background? What interests did they have as a kid and can you environmentally piece together why they are where they are? 

Being a college graduate myself, not in engineering, and after being in an industry for nearly a full year now, I see two surrounding perspectives of sitting in a ripe environment to explore and build segments:

The first perspective is beneficial as it allows me to dig deeper than most people ever would in my industry. There is a lot I have figured out, and a lot of it is also just a redirection of what I have previously known to a new area. It is a two-way street. I can apply what I already know asking the “why” question to bridge clusters of segments and I can ask the “why” question even more to learn new things and build new segments.

The second perspective is negative, and this touches on the modern world part of the equation, in that the “why” question is not embraced. To put that another way, I see the majority of people aren’t very open to questions related to the workings of things. There is a threshold a lot of people have and once you hit that threshold and surpass it, whether in knowledge or they just don’t want you to know, they close up. That makes it hard to get a thorough understanding of how and why certain things are. On top of all of it – it makes it very difficult to solve a problem.

With the key to my 3ord point being the “why” question, the “big picture” to my 3ord point is this:

You have to have the state of mind to build your understanding off of. It is a continuous building cycle. The more you experience and the more you ask the “why” question the more questions you’ll have and the better understanding at which you should, eventually, arrive. If you don’t have the state of mind to think through that process you will never gain an understanding. It has to make sense, partially, enough to provoke asking a “why” question directed towards what you don’t understand in an effort to understand it. I think most people loose interest very quickly.

If all we do is continuously evolve in technology to where we are expanding beyond what once was we loose the background and the reasoning as to why something is. How many devices do we have today that are throw-away’s – as in if it quits working we throw it out? What about those devices that if it quits working we hire someone else to fix it? If a device is truly a throw-away,what got  us to that point? What about those devices that are not throw-aways? Your vehicle for example. If it needs an oil change, what do most of us do? On the other side of the equation, how do you know it needs an oil change, or do you know?

I know – program a computer and a sensor to tell you!

Why can’t you know yourself?

Have you ever asked a question to try and solve a problem when there are people that know, somewhere, but after searching the only one available to ask the question to, and that person should be a higher level than what is normally attainable, ignores the question and shifts the topic of discussion because they don’t know? I think most people would never experience that (not including school or any other environment where, if you ask enough people, you hit the one that knows) because most people don’t have the ability to get to the point where they have the state of mind to ask the question in the first place.

In my example, which I won’t detail here because it really doesn’t matter, I solved a problem after everyone within my industry I asked questions to (I had lots of them, naturally) zipped up tighter than a drum or ignored the questions. My guess is none of those I asked knew, they just didn’t say so. Those that did know were in a ”black box” and, no matter how many people I went to, could not get in to the “black box”.

I guarantee 99.9999% of the very few that have questions rejected on that level give up the process – whether that is hiring out the work or throwing out the scenario in which the problem is present and replace it. Ham radio taught me otherwise – it is a constant learning environment where questions are asked, answered, and those that aren’t readily answered are researched, possibly experimented, until there is an answer. It is the outside-the-box thinking.

If more people carry the same perspective on understanding there are a lot of things in this world that would work much better. Of course, most people don’t have the state of mind. I bet video games, being on the computer all the time (gaming, facebooking), watching movies, and partying (some drinking too much) are great outlets to further the thought processes of our kids. Some may make us more well-rounded people, but they don’t kick-start the problem solving model (the pyramid model I mentioned earlier).  The further technology advances the more we loose the basics that created those technologies in the first place. How are people to be effective problem solvers if they don’t know the background and don’t have the state of mind?

Most of my driving today was way out in the country so I got a great opportunity to get in to some real quiet RF environments. To my surprise the noise floor became non-existant in places. All of the noise I was picking up from before was power line noise and other crap flying around around/near town.

I thought my antenna came un-plugged or my attenuator was on because the noise was so low. I had my antenna connection pop out of the tuner (check my post on the mobile installation and the HF antenna/tuner – just a wire plugged in to the center pin on the tuner) last week once so I knew that was a possibility this time around. A quick spin of the dial revealed activity on the band so my antenna was surely connected!

When I get a chance I will still do the grounding. I am not sure when I will get around to it though, maybe in a few months. I have a cap on order so once I get through a few of these “bumps in the road” I can apply a little more of myself to my mobile install. For now it is working much better than I could have asked for anyway. Cool stuff!

I also bent my face plate mount where I want it. Now I can actually read the display when I am driving and not have to lean way over. I have enough space to lift the console lid and the knobs are within easy reach with my arm resting on the console – more comfortable than my other truck. The only thing I wish I had in this truck that my other one did was an arm rest that folds out of the seat. The only place I have to rest my arm is the console lid – which is comfortable, but it is a bit far compared to being right next to the seat.

The current face plate mount works OK. The biggest improvement I can make to it now is to extend it about 3/4″. The reason is I am using one of the stock screws (that holds on some of the front parts of the console container to the “frame”) to hold the mount. This works but the single screw allows too much movement as the mount likes to move around it. I can tighten the screw down and make it not move a whole lot, but it works its way loose. By extending the mount I can fold the back part down and around the plastic that the screw goes in to. This will lock it in place so it can’t move – sort of like a coat hanger over the top of a door. The “lip” latches on and holds it from moving. Combined with the screw this would be a pretty bomb-proof method.

Again, not one hole has been poked in the truck (as of yet) in this whole process!

The way I had the audio run in to the system was through the headphone jack on the side of the face plate of the FT-857D. This was a bit cumbersome as the plug stuck out from the faceplate and the audio had to be adjusted by the volume control on the rig.

My updated method is to use the accessory plug on the back of the FT-857D. I used the 6 pin plug. There is a constant level audio port on there – the 1200 baud Data Out pin. Ground the shield of your cable to the GND pin and the center to the data out and you have constant audio! The 9600 port gave me constant audio, but it was un-squelched. The 1200 baud port was squelched and works OK.

The only improvement I could make to this set up is to increase the intensity of the constant level audio. As it sits right now the audio is a lot softer than it was if I adjusted the volume knob through the headphone jack. It is better than needing to worry about where the volume knob is though so I am happy with it. I just need to turn up the truck’s volume knob a bit more than I would otherwise. I don’ t know if there is a way around it other than putting a line level amplifier on the  system (too much work).

This is all a continuous experiment and work-in-progress! I am sure there will be a point in time when I am content with what I have done. I can live with the audio. There is definitely a lot more work to do though.  

I do have a cap for the truck on order. This will play in to how some of my gear is installed (antennas, cables, etc). So stay tuned for more. The dealer gave me a 3 week estimate on when it will come in so we’ll see what happens. Routing the wires out of it to the HF antenna might be a bit of a challenge. I will surely post about my progress in that area as it happens.

It is a 2010 F250 lariat crew cab short bed with the 6.4L Power Stroke Diesel engine. Of course its 4×4 also.

My mobile installation includes my regular FT-857D for now. It does everything – VHF/UHF/HF all modes.

The antennas for my installation right now are a dual band whip with a lip mount on the hood and a 102″ whip with an LDG Z-11Pro tuner for HF. I had the lip mount on the top of one of my back doors in my old truck. That was problematic. I fought pinched coax issues and it was just a pain in the butt. So I decided to put the antenna on the hood. It is a lower profile as well – if I am going to need to park in a parking garage I can take the HF antenna off and still have my normal VHF/UHF comms. The drawback is lower efficiency. For daily driving it won’t be an issue at all. I can hit my usual repeater on 5 watts all day long as it is.

The HF side of things will need some work. I have the antenna hooked up and running but this is where most of my effort from now on will be spent. The reasoning is I have a lot of grounding work to do. Based on running HF in my last truck I learned how much of a difference grounding makes in a mobile installation (also referred to as “bonding”). The single most important ground I found, going towards reducing RFI from the vehicle running, is the exhaust pipe to the frame. The reason is that the ground towards the rear of the truck will cut off the radiation properties of the exhaust pipe. If you think about it – the rubber isolators to keep the pipe “quiet” make nice RF insulators. The length of the exhaust pipe also makes a GREAT radiator of any RF generated at the engine (injectors, spark plugs, coils, motors, etc). Grounding the pipe kills the radiation. The second most important grounds (plural) are the cab and bed together, hood (if it doesn’t already have good grounding) to cab, and all of that to the frame. This will kill ground loops and give you a solid RF ground. An issue a lot of people have with mobile installs is that the RF from the radio starts to play havoc with the computers on the vehicle. The other issue is RF can get back in to the radio. When you ground everything well you improve the performance of the radio system enormously.

OK – on to the installation. The first thing I will say is that everything I have done so far has been 100 times EASIER than in my 2003 Chevy Silverado. For those of you who are a bit fearful of poking holes in a brand new vehicle – this installation has made NOT A SINGLE HOLE. All of my wires have been run through existing openings. Even better – the only parts I have had to remove for the installation are access panels to factory wiring channels. In my last truck I did a lot of work pulling out the rear seat and running wires under the carpet/insulation. No need here in the Super Duty. Everything is easy to access for the most part. The hardest part – figuring out how to do it!

My first step was to put on my dual band antenna. Here are a few pictures of what I am dealing with:

The mount has been adjusted to keep the antenna vertical, or close to it. The adjustments in the mount are detented so I can’t get it precisely where I want it. I ended up with a bit of forward lean. I figured the antenna would go back to vertical when on the road so that wasn’t too bad.

The coax is run back towards the firewall right under the black plastic where the windshield wipers are. I took out one screw to give me the space I needed to route the coax/connector through. Then I ran the coax down the door jam (on the OUTSIDE of the hinges – towards the front of the truck, not the cab). This is not the ideal way to do this, but it works for now. The better route would be to get the coax through the firewall as I routed the power cable (later down the page).

Once the coax was past the hinges I ran it on the outside of the weather stripping until I got to the separation between the weather stripping. As you can see the factory wiring channel is exposed.

I like the design of the weather stripping Ford has used. It is really robust. It slides over top a crease in the sheet metal and is a very solid hold.

This is what everything looks like all said and done. The coax is run all the way to the rear behind the seat to plug in to the rig.

Here you can see, somewhat, the radio under the back seat. Its a real trick getting it in and out. I am glad the FT-857D is as skinny as it is! Otherwise it would be a no-go for sure. The black flat thingy in the front is the FoldFlat Storage plate. When the seat is up you can fold this out and it makes a nice hard flat floor for carrying something like a TV box or a dresser.

Edit: I figured I would mention this also. You may note that the radio is not bolted in. I don’t have the hard mount installed, and likely will not (in the near future anyway). The reason is that I use the FT-857D SO much. It is my grab-and-go radio. If I permanently install it in the truck it would take me as long to get it out as it will to put it in. I don’t have it grounded yet, but that is coming as with the other grounding I am going to do on the truck itself. Having the remote cables and mount for the face plate (a clip-in style) is as far as my permanent installation is going to get.

I may get another rig for the truck at some point. Maybe an IC-7000, I like the IF-DSP and color screen. Then again, I already know the FT-857D really well from operating one for so long. It would make having a do-everything grab-n’-go radio MUCH easier. I have a go-kit for this FT-857D (Pelican case) that has been used maybe 3 times since I made it because I always have to tear the rig out of the truck to use it.

I actually did the hard-wired power after I put the antennas on, but I’ll toss it in the middle here.

The power wires are 10 gauge stranded (from Lowes). I ran them down the drivers side wiring channel from the firewall to the back of the cab.

The positive side passes through a 50 amp circuit breaker. I have been using these in all of my mobile installs and they work pretty well. I have had a  couple of them go bad, though. They are supposed to be water proof but I think the under-the-hood environment takes its toll after a few years. This was one of the good ones I had left. The negative lead is straight to the battery. After all, if it grounds out it goes to the same place anyway – the truck is a standard negative ground chassis.

There are actually two batteries in this beast – one on each side. This one is on the drivers side.

The wires go back up towards the firewall to the following pass-through.

I tried to get them through the boot but it is just too tight for this size of wire. Plus, the boot is real hard to get to. I can’t reach it other than my finger tips from under the hood unless I start removing stuff. The engine compartment is JAM PACKED. They didn’t waste any space in this at all. That being said – some more major engine work with the 6.4L diesel requires the cab to be removed for just this reason – you physically can’t reach everything.

The wires are resting against the plastic “clip”, not the metal. Even if the insulation is worn through the positive wire won’t ground out unless it contacts the negative wire next to it (I doubt that could happen, and I would say wearing through the wires to begin with is a slim chance as there isn’t anywhere for the wires to rub/move – tight fit). I will keep an eye on it though.

The pannel here is to the left of the emergency brake. The power cable is just routed through and on in to the wiring channel. Again, everything in this truck is SO easy to get in to!

This is the rear channel. The front one was shown earlier (with the coax for the dual bander passing through the split weather stripping in the center). If you look close around the seat belt anchor you can see the rest of the wire coiled up. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

OK, so moving on to the HF side of things – at least what I have now.

Here is the mount. It is nothing special - just a piece of wood cut from a 2×4, aluminum bar, and a 3/8″x24 mount (the hard mount with a bolt, not an SO-239). The wire hooks in to it with a ring terminal on the bottom then it is all sealed up with my favorite stuff – Plasti-Dip!

The lead to the antenna is just a solder blob on the end of the wire press-fit in the center pin of the Antenna SO-239 on the tuner. Nothing fancy and it works. Bannana plugs also work. At the house I use an old PL-259 and a short piece of 14g solid wire with a spade connector on it for connecting random wires. It is the best method I’ve come up with, I was just lazy here and re-used an earlier experiment (this whole antenna set up).

The coax and power lead can be see going back to the cab.

This is the vent that the wires go to behind the passenger side rear seat. The liner was a pain to get off – it is held in with a couple of the push clips. They take a lot of work to get out. Be careful – it is possible to break them.

Here is a better shot. The motor there is the drive for the rear window.

The PL-259 was a trick to work through the vent opening. I managed to do it. There is plenty of room but the cable and connector come in sideways to the back of the cab so you have to bend it 90deg to fit through the opening. The string helps out with that – note it is wrapped around the center pin too, not just the part right against the jacket.

There is a slot in the liner right next to the vent so I just poked the wires through. Pretty nice!  You can see one of the push pin type clips to the upper left of the latch looking thing against the liner (the round thing). The latch is an access panel for a car seat anchor. There are 3 of the anchors and each one has a clip/pin near it.

On to the normal, non-torn up INSIDE!

Click on the picture to enlarge it. The FT-857D is wired in to the sound system in the truck. I have an audio cable from the headphone jack (with a toroid choke to keep RF out) to the AUX port on the dash. If you take a look at the touch screen the bar on the bottom right (white with a blue-ish tint) is the input meter. Its the same thing on any kind of input audio device – keep the bars from peaking and the audio is nice and clean. Once the bars peak the input is over-driven and the audio gets distorted.

I believe there is a constant level audio port on the accessory plug on the back of the FT-857D for digital modes. I will dig up the manual and see if I can hard-wire that in to the truck. That way I don’t have to deal with the audio cable how I have it here, as well as not have to worry about where the volume knob is on the rig.

There is also a speed compensated audio control. This is nice – no need to touch the knobs going down the road! The only drawback is when my phone rings – it cuts out all audio sources and turns in to my phone. It is great for hands-free operation but if I am in the middle of a conversation on the radio it drops the radio audio.

Note the use of the existing screw for mounting. No holes drilled (in the truck, yet…)

The metal mount I used needs to be adjusted or replaced entirely. Having the display angled like that is hard to see. This definitely needs some improvement.

This truck is a real dream. I had the opportunity to get it and it was too good to pass up. My fuel mileage (again, its a diesel) has been around 16mpg so far (3.55 gears). This is with a non-broken in engine. I expected to be around 13-14mpg so I am more than happy with the performance thus far. My highway mileage is closer to 18mpg but daily driving I’ve been around 16. Not too bad for a truck thats over 8500lbs. Once I hit 5-10,000 miles the engine will start to pick up a few mpg . All the parts have to be merried together nice – piston rings seated in the cylinders, etc.

That about wrapps it up! Stay tuned for more improvements/adjustments as I make them.