so ive been running a Yaesu FT-7900 in my F-150 for about a year now and the antenna situation has been kind of a mess the whole time. started with a mag mount on the roof which worked okay but i was always worried about scratching the paint or it flying off at highway speeds, which it did once, thankfully in a parking lot.

right now ive got a lip mount on the tailgate but the coax routing is driving me crazy and the SWR on 70cm is not great, like 1.8 to 1 which isnt terrible but i feel like i can do better. wondering if anyone has done a proper through-hole mount on a truck or one of those bed rail setups. i do use the bed for actual work stuff so i cant have anything that gets in the way too much.

also open to hearing what antenna you're running. im on a NMO mount dual band right now, think its a Tram 1185 or something similar.

the bed rail mount things are hit or miss in my experience. i tried one of the clamp-on styles a few years back on a silverado and the vibration was just awful, loosened up constantly and i eventually gave up on it. what actually worked for me was drilling a proper NMO hole in the cab roof, did it myself with a stepped bit and one of those cheap NMO hole saw kits from amazon. yeah its a permanent hole but honestly the performance improvement was worth it and you route the coax down through the headliner and out the firewall, its pretty clean once you do it.

for the SWR issue on 70cm with a lip mount, a lot of that is just the ground plane geometry being weird. not much you can do short of moving the antenna to a better spot on the vehicle.

i have a similar truck setup and what i ended up doing was a mirror mount on the passenger side mirror arm, its not perfect but the ground plane is decent enough and the coax run is pretty manageable going in through the door seal. SWR on both bands came out really good actually, under 1.3 on 2m and maybe 1.5 on 70cm if i remember right. only downside is you have to be a bit careful in tight spots or parking garages because the antenna sticks out a bit further than you'd expect