I have a Johnson Messenger. It has one pair of HC6/U crystals in it. Where is a good place these days to get crystals for CB or other things?
There's a ham who calls himself "The Crystal Man" who's good for those, and a bunch of other types. I can't recall his callsign or web addy, but I'm sure one of the boatanchor loving crystal hogs that hang out here have it.
Chris, when I was teen I used near vertical half-wave dipoles mounted at the top of a 25 ft. steel TV antenna mast for CB, one going N.E. the other west. They worked very well for TX and heard skip much earlier, up to 45 minutes, before you could hear it on stock antennas. It pissed my Uncle off to no end that I could talk nearly as much skip as he could with my 5 watts as he could with his "linyeer".
I used vertical halfwaves a bit when pirating, shooting the haul line over clear branches high in towering sycamores, but sycamores have tendency to go hollow. After a couple of "Run like Hell" incidents involving falling big branches that were rotten on the inside, I went with a 1/4 vert with an elevated ground plane. The results were about the same, plenty of other tree species would do the job, and it was a heck of a lot safer.