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It seems a little quiet, so I figured I would share a walk-thru video of a portable field setup for my radio gear. The video focuses on my Ham gear and two club events I am going to be involved in, but you can easily put something together like this for field use for any radio platform, including GMRS. In fact, the X200 antenna works great for GMRS frequencies. I've posted the SWR readings from the analyzer in another thread, a month or so back. On the low side it was 1.3:1 and the high side was 1.4:1. Not a pro video by any means, but you should get the idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9TkDnRDn4U

Ah. Makes sense. Finally, looked up your call neighbor [emoji14] Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

I went over to where my base station is set up. Turned on my radios and started scanning as I had a few minutes to burn. Started hearing some unusual traffic on channel 6. The station was giving out what I thought was really personal information. I was hearing: peoples names, dates of birth, health information, number of family members, car make and model with tag numbers. I listened for a little bit. Scanned for the CTCSS or DCS tone. There was no tone found. Contacted my local police department. Took my radio down to the PD and the Officer was also concerned about this type of information being transmitted over an open channel. They began to investigate this. I decided to key up with my call sign and try to contact the operators and get there purpose and company name. It turned out to the the local food bank. They were IDing people to receive food. I advised the PD I was going down to talk to them about this. They said they were sending an officer as well. I just told them that people as far away as 10 miles could here this information and that I was concerned about this type of information being sent over an open channel. They seemed a little confused on how I was listening to them. They stopped using the radios and went to cell phones. Just thought I would share this story. I guess that makes me the radio police or at least concerned enough to reach out. Thanks for reading. WRCW870

I think you may be confusing a drip loop for a common-mode choke. If you have a proper antenna, with a true unbalanced feed point, you do not need a choke at the antenna. Those are only required if you have one of those cheap ham-type J-poles, or other balanced feed antenna. If you do need a choke on your antenna, do NOT make it by coiling 1/2" line. Leave the 1/2" straight up to the base of the antenna, and use a 3-foot jumper of RG-8x, RG-58u, or similar small coax to make your coil, which should be 4 or 5 turns about 6 inches in diameter. You can also make a common mode choke by taking a foot-long jumper of RG-213 or LMR-400 and put ferrite clamp-on chokes all the way from one end to the other. Again, on most decent commercial antennas, this is not needed. A drip-loop is simply a low-point in the coax right before it comes into your building, so that rain running down the coax will drip off onto the ground, rather than get funneled into your house. This is not even needed in all installations, as sometimes the coax is not running down a tower, but rather across a roof, under a soffit, or into a conduit. Short jumpers at each end aren't going to hurt you much. As Lscott posted, use type "N" connectors where-ever possible for lowest loss.