Can somebody help me with a tow question?

[geordie]

Originally Posted by MAXUM

I need to do my General class so I can go HF too, eventually I want to put a nice HF rig in my camp. Not sure what to do about an antenna though.

Car to car 5/8 works better because it flattens the radiation pattern. If you are going to have mobile you might as well go for a very slightly more expensive antenna and get better range. But even a cheap magmount antenna is better than being right next to the transmitter, even if ~150MHz doesn't couple in to bodies very well.

Any mobile HF solution is mostly convenience and not much about performance. I have a selection of hamsticks and an Icom-7000 with a tuner. Even with that you can get hundreds of miles reliably, like Utah to the California coast. I mostly keep it for off-road emergencies and for that I have a budipole in a bag that goes with the overland gear.

Sorry, this seems to have got off topic. Nobody would use a thousand dollar HF rig for casual car to car communications. Except in Australia and Iceland.