Here's what you do. Run a wire off of the positive terminal of your battery through a 10 amp fuse and into your radio. Ground it to wherever you fancy.

 

A 10A fuse? Not on a US legal radio. Use no more than a 3A fuse. 2.5A is probably more than sufficient. Use whatever came with the radio from the factory, which was probably 2A.

 

You can get a better signal to noise ratio by going with a single point (aka star) ground. Grounding wherever you fancy wont get you lowest practically attainable noise performance unless you happen to stumble onto proper signal routing by chance. Sure it'll still work but good practice goes a long way in terms of extending achievable real world transcieve range.

 

in my 96 I have my CB mounted to the ceiling. Straight back from the review mirror and it doesn't interfere at all with the mirror, even the4 mic cable doesn't. Then I have a retractable mic hold hooked to the mirror mount. I have my 8ft whips mounted on my tool box and ran the wires in the back window and through the headliner and popped it out through the overhead console. For power I ran a fused live wire and ground up the A piller and across the headline and out right beside Coaxial cable. I also have an underhood PA so the speaker wires follow the power wires.

I also have a marine band radio mounted to the plastic directly below the radio on the slant part. I just use a magnet mount antenna for it.

When dealing with CB or any two-way system make sure you tune them with the proper SWR meter, other wise they won't talk to the car next to you. Some radios have an SWR meter built in, these work ok but I always back them up with a real one. You want it to be around 2 on the display. You tune using channel 1 and 40.

 

In a perfect setup it'd be dead nuts 1.0:1. The higher the VSWR, the more power is being reflected back from the antenna to the final output transistor(s) which must dissipate that energy as heat. At a VSWR of 2:1, 11% of the energy reaching the antenna is being reflected back to the transmitter -- 11% shouldn't kill any but the cheapest of radios, though. The more troublesome side effect is that the higher the VSWR, the greater the likelihood that nearby electronics will receive interference.

 

Abut grounding, I was talking about the electrical, not the antenna. Of course you need a good ground-plane!

 

So was Ugly1.