All good advice to you, Nathan. The antenna is a certain length out of the box. If shortened to satisfy a need, asthetics, and so on, that deminishes the capability of the antenna and will definitely reduce your range. Even if shortend a couple inches or so. I wrote up a short paragraph on wavelengh a while back explaining how it works and why, and why the antenna is the length it is. All this can come into play when you are having problems if, of course, you changed the length of the antenna either by accident or intentionally. It should be approximately 1.04 meters in length or right around 39.5 inches long.

Hope all this stuff helps, Nathan.

DS.