How do police, fire and ambulances deal with parking garages, say you have a quarter-wave VHF antenna mounted on the roof of a cruiser, fire truck, or an ambulance, how do they get into the garage with antenna on the roof that makes it higher than the maximum allowable height for a garage?
The antennas are not made out of glass. They do not break when they hit a parking garage.
The whips are very thin and very flexible. They will not have an issue with a parking garage unless there is a stupidly low level of clearance, and that minimal clearance would damage the lights long before it hurt the antenna.
I've had NMO mounts on all my personal vehicles and work vehicles for decades now. My wife's truck has a 1/4 wave whip and she drives it in/out of the garage every day without issue. The top half of the antenna hits the garage door every single time. Been doing that for years. Her old SUV did the same thing, for 10 years. Thousands of passes through the garage without any issues.
And if the clearance was too low, the antenna just flexes back. Worst case is the whip takes a bit of a permanent tilt, but being that we have opposable thumbs, we can easily bend that back to vertical.
Here's a worst case scenario:
My F-350 (aluminum body) with a Larsen NMOQ wide band VHF antenna on the top. These whips are very thick and stiff. There's a spring at the base. I pull into a parking garage and the antenna taps along the overhead. Suddenly the clearance drops to about 4" above the cab. The antenna gets bent all the way back at the spring to 90º. I stop, remove the antenna.
The spring has a permanent list to the stern, but the NMO mount is fine and the whip is fine. Out of the garage I screw it back and and drive home. I ordered a new spring and replaced it, keeping the same NMO mount, base and whip. Everything was fine.
Work truck as a couple of antennas on the roof and gets to play on overgrown site access roads with lots of low tree branches. One of the low tree branches bent the headache rack behind the cab, 2" x 1" steel. Had to remove it, but the antennas on the roof were fine.
Parking garages and low branches are not an issue unless the vehicle operator gets a case of the stupids and drives into a place they shouldn't be.
