[HoustonHam] this is a very elementary question, but

[Christopher Mitchell]

Hi, folks,

I'm down in Pasadena with this old Radio Shack gear that a friend of  
mine bought on a whim years ago.  He hasn't yet gotten his license, so  
he wanted me to see if it worked.  Well, I have no experience with 10m  
so I don't know what I should expect, if anything, but given that the  
ground wave should work about as well as CB I am a little surprised  
that I don't hear anything but static and a few harmonic tones across  
the entire band in SSB/AM/FM.

It is a Radio Shack HTX-10 and he bought it with a RS CB antenna that  
could supposedly be trimmed down a bit for 10m resonance.   
http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp? 
catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=21-972

Two questions really:

1) Having found an antenna length calculator but not coming up with  
anything that seemed reasonable, what length should this antenna be cut  
down to?  I do not know what fraction of a wavelength it is attempting  
to be currently.  The RS site does not have any documentation, but I am  
going to make a guess this is a very simple calculation.

2) Even if the whip is not tuned for 10m transmission, would that  
preclude ANY reception?  I may be showing my ignorance, but it's not  
off by *that much*.  I wouldn't expect to have an acceptable SWR as it  
is, but I did think that maybe I should be able to get some  
intelligible signals.  (I also thought it was a 10m antenna, though, as  
did he, until I started investigating.  Remember, I didn't buy this  
stuff ! :) )

I'll be getting a Yaesu FT-817 in the mail some time next week and will  
be able to do some very close definitive TX/RX tests on it, but  
currently if I could just get pushed in the right direction I'd very  
much appreciate it.

Thanks,
Chris KC5PFI /AG