DABEAR wrote:
P.S. I went back and re-read and did miss the root of the problem.
So, I'm going to lean on this: My friend spent so much time, money and
effort trying to get the problem solved (the aircraft is old design and
the cockpit cramped, extraordinarily hard to work in, that he finally
threw in the towel, bought an entire new system to include the antenna,
and told me that he should have just replaced the entire mess in the
first place, considering the money it cost him to troubleshoot an
unsuccessful repair. I look at the advice you've been given, "replace
this, replace that," and wonder if you shouldn't take your current
radio out back behind the barn and shoot it, and bring something
altogether new in to restart from scratch? New equipment requires less
maintenance is the old expression...

I don't own a plane but do fly my club's planes. A similiar situation
happened to me with the
garbled and weak communication. The radio was checked out fine, it was
my headphones.
Lou