For Christmas I got my first CB, and I am really excited. For now I just have a cheap Radio Shack CB, if all goes well, I am planning on upgrading in the future. But my Question is... is it better to try and "hardwire" it into my car, or should I just get an cig. liter plug? And if the "hardwire" is the better way to go, how do I go about doing it?

Thanks
Adam

In my opinion, it doesn't really matter if you hard-wire it or use the cig. plug. The power is the same, as long as you include the inline fuse with either option. It just depends on what you want. I went ahead and hard-wired mine for a nice clean install, and to keep my two cig. plugs free. I spliced the CB into the existing power and ground lines for my knight rider lights. I installed those lights with beefy wires initially for easy additions later, good planning on my part. If you're hard-wiring the CB "from scratch", it's actually very easy. Just run a 12 or 14 ga. wire from the battery, through a inline fuse (probably 2 amps or so, that's what mine came with), through the firewall, and to the CB. My CB's inline fuse was already placed on the lead close to the unit, and 2 fuses are better than one. It's always good to have a fuse on the line close to the battery. Then just ground the negative lead from the CB to the firewall, under the carpet, to the battery itself, etc.

I got a professional installer to run the coax line from the antenna to the CB. I'm a lot more experienced now, and would do it myself, I just wasn't comfy with it at the time. If you're permanently mounting the antenna, try to hide the coax behind interior panels and stuff for a clean installation. And be sure to use the correct coax and length for your CB and antenna. I think you always need something like 16 feet to keep the wavelength right or something. I'm sure others on the board can clear that up.

And remember, a crappy CB with an awesome antenna (and coax) is much much better than a crappy antenna with a great unit.

Good luck!

Alec, thanks for all your help. Real quick though...how much was the professional part of the install?

Thanks,

Adam

Too much. Actually, it didn't take them long at all to run the coax and stuff from the roof. The thing that took a long time was that they fabbed a custom mount for the antenna. To mount a normal antenna mount and run the coax it shouldn't take a pro more than an hour. So the cost just depends on their labor charge. It took about 2.5 hours for my install because the dufus kept messing the custom brackets up. Oh well, you live and learn.

Adam, if you can figure out a way, you may want to wire the CB directly to the battery. Do a search in this forum. It has been discussed many times. Wiring through the cig lighter and fuse boxes will not help the bad interference problems that plague Explorers. Routing directly to the battery, using an inline fuse, and keeping the wires as far away from the engine electronics will help the problem somewhat.

Originally posted by JGSTEWART8
i want to run my CB directly to the battery.. what is an inline fuse!!!

i have some heavy duty 2 part copper rubber coated wire that should work i think.. alittle help here!!

The cable from the batterie to your CB needs to go through a fuse. You can either buy a litle fuse box and route the cables you have through that box, or you use a special cable, which has a fuse device included.