More info?  What does everything on the label read, exactly?

This one's a pretty good deal and gives you eight memory channels with a cheap option:

http://www.mfjenterprises.com/Product.php?productid=MFJ-490X

I have one, it works well and is very easy to use.

Verification: I never read the manual.

On the outside, ground the panel to your household electrical service entrance ground using at least #6 AWG copper wire.

Good ones are made that way, but I've seen many mag mounts that unfortunately aren't.

A local ham friend brought over a "Firestick" CB antenna mag-mount with a very powerful magnet and coax connected to it.  It worked terribly.  I measured continuity between the shell of the coax connector and the base of the mag mount, and there wasn't any at all -- complete open circuit.

So, I took the base apart.  Inside, the coax outer conductor was bolted directly to the magnet, but there was no foil or anything anywhere (factory stock), and between the magnet and the outside world was a thin layer of plastic (anti-scratch), but no foil in between.

The magnet was 100% non-conductive (like millions of Ohms) and the magnet itself evidently was intended to be the "capacitor."  It didn't do a good job of that.

Replacing the mount with one from Larsen took care of the whole problem.

There isn't any ground wave on 10 meters.

If CBers are working each other over 50-mile paths with 5W and an omnidirectional vertical on each end, that must be a very "flat" terrain place (Florida?).  It ain't happening here.

The YO-301 isn't really a spectrum analyzer.  It's a "monitor scope" that matches the old Yaesu FT-301 transceiver, although for monitoring your own transmitted signal envelope it would work with any kind of transmitter.

But it's not doing any "spectrum analyzing," it's just serving as an oscilloscope with an RF pickup.

It will display images of received signals when connected to a compatible receiver, which has nothing to do with transmitting through it.  When used as a receiving IF monitor, it's not much of a "spectrum analyzer," as it can only view signals that make it through the receiver's filtering, so it's a rather "narrow" view of a small slice of spectrum right around wherever the receiver is tuned.

If you're getting out 50 miles on 2m with an indoor j-pole and 5 Watts, I suspect that means you're accessing a repeater 50 miles away, and not another home station with an indoor j-pole.

In such cases, the repeater is doing almost all the work by having a very advantageous location (usually on a hilltop or mountaintop, or a tall building or a tall tower), and your own station doesn't need to do much.

With 10m, it's very different.  For one, there are very few 10m repeaters and you may not even have one within 50 miles.  Tech licensees are not authorized to use 10m repeaters (but all higher classes can).  So, you have to work other stations "simplex," directly, station-to-station and most home stations don't have the great locations that repeaters have.

As such, 50 miles "station-to-station" on 10m is actually pretty far, and beyond the range of a lot of 10m users.  The exception, of course, is when the band is "open" for ionospheric propagation, and then low power and a dipole can easily contact other stations thousands of miles away, thanks to the ionosphere!   Problem is, we have no control over that so you just have to "catch" propagation when it happens.

There isn't any ground wave on 10m, and even if there was a little bit, you wouldn't work it with a horizontally polarized antenna.

Local work on 10m is direct wave or tropo forward scatter.  Direct wave is mostly line-of-sight stuff, so the higher your antenna is elevated above ground, the longer it can be.  But tropo works way beyond the horizon, and 10 miles with an indoor dipole is probably the norm.  50 miles is certainly possible, but that's usually achieved by stations using beam antennas on towers.

That you're hearing bleeps and bloops is likely a good sign that the receiver is actually working, as those sounds are probably from household electronic appliances that have oscillators in them (almost everything does, including microwave ovens, modems, electronic clocks, cooktops, dishwashers, alarm systems, and of course computers, monitors...practically everything nowadays).

10m is mostly a "daytime" band which can be open from fairly early morning to maybe mid-afternoon, and then often "closes" and is very closed at night.  If you're listening at night, that could be the problem.

See if you can find a neighbor who has a 10m station and ask him to run a test with you.  If you don't know any very local hams, you can do a zip code search on QRZ.com or the FCC data base and will probably find some hams in your zip code -- who you may not know, but may be able to "look up" and meet.

I agree.  What your antenna has with a mag mount actually is an RF ground, although probably not a real electrical ground at the antenna end.  Doesn't really matter, as "good" mag mounts work well at VHF and UHF.

On HF, you could have a pretty lousy RF ground because the magnet's not nearly big enough to provide enough coupling to the metal below it.  Some of the really BIG 3-magnet and 4-magnet mounts work better at HF, but still far from perfectly.

I think you'll find Step 1 requires a bit more, since tuning is reiterative.  When you peak PLATE, then LOAD, and go back and peak PLATE again, you may not be fully loaded.  It can take 2-3 trips around both controls before you hit the proper LOADing point.

And after that, what I generally find is the amp still isn't really fully loaded.  I watch Ig and crank "up" the loading (reducing the LOAD capacitance) a bit more.  If the Ig goes down and the output power remains about the same, that's good.

Experiment with the dummy load and see what you find.

I always tune for "most output power with minimum possible grid current," and keep Ig well under the recommended maximum.  I don't watch plate current much.  While tuning, I don't watch it at all.  I'll take a look to see what it is after the tuning process is completed; however since I very rarely run a full-carrier mode (like RTTY, FM, AM, etc), no matter what the "peak" plate current is, the average is usually quite low and I've never lost a tube running them even 1.5x the max Ip rating on short duty-cycle modes like SSB  (or even CW).

How do you transmit through a spectrum analyzer?

I've never seen anything like that.

A pretty good list of beacons is here.  Scroll down to the 28 MHz beacons, there are a LOT of them.

http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/por/28.htm

There isn't any time of day or night that I don't hear 10m beacons from "somewhere."  When the band is completely closed, I hear local ones.  When it's open, I hear a lot more of them, sometimes two on the same frequency.  There's a whole bunch of 10m beacons on the air, and you ought to be able to hear "something" provided you're listening in the right part of the band (which for the U.S. is 28.200 to 28.300).

They are CW (code), so if you can copy code it makes it a lot easier to figure out which one you're listening to.

I think the 80B is a better deal also.

It also includes a built-in front-panel PEP watt/SWR meter the 811HD doesn't have, and that alone is worth about $150.  Bigger power supply, too.  And still "desktop" and "quiet."

The 897D is bigger because it has the provision for internal batteries or an internal AC power supply for fixed-station operation from the mains.

It also has provision for a side-mounted/attached automatic antenna tuner, which the 857D does not offer.

Radio circuits are the same.  The 897D operating panel is a bit nicer to use; the 857D has a lot of buttons around its perimeter which might be pretty easily pressed accidentally (I know I've certainly done that!) and the 897D doesn't have that issue.