I went through a carwash with my antenna up and it got all eff'd up. I took it out and replaced it with a new one and noticed that my reception isn't as good as it use to be. While trying to diagnose it I noticed that with the key is on "Accessory" the reception is flawless. But with the ignition and engine are on it gets a lot more static than before.

Any ideas?

 

Ant. is not grounded properly.

An ant. needs two grounding points, the first is at the base of the ant, normally you get this just by mounting the ant. to the cars sheet metal body, this ground is connected to the outside "shield" of the ant. cable, the other ground is at the radio, the ant. plug, [standard Motorola] has a ground, [larger barrel part] also connected to outside "shield' part of ant. cable and mast, [center pin] connected to ant. mast, when plugged into radio the "larger barrel" grounds to the radio chassis.

You will need to confirm grounds and continuity with a multimeter.
Unplug the ant. from the radio and test for a ground on the barrel, should test as full continuity to chassis ground, test for ground on the center pin, there should be no continuity to ground, test for continuity between barrel and center pin, there should be none, test for continuity between center pin and the ant. mast, there should be full continuity. 94

 

^^ Thanks! I just checked it... No continuity from the mast to the center pin.

Can rewire this with regular wire? The break up is somewhere within the wire. Can I just run regular copper wire from the barrel to the mast? Then do the same to the ground?

Or is there something special to the type of wire that's used? I see it's made up like coaxial cable wire.

 

The "mast" wire needs to be inside the shield wire, [ground].

You will need to replace the ant. 94