Brand New to CB world, need guidance with antenna - SWR off the charts.

As the title indicates, I'm having issues calibrating the antenna, the SWR read is way over 3.0 when I set the meter to calibrate (needle on calibrate).

From what I've read it's most likely a short/grounding issues, but I can't figure what I'm doing wrong.

My antenna is admittedly tiny, and is for vehicles while I'm using as a base station antenna. It's a approximately 12" mast with the coil in the middle (this thing from the late 70's/early 80's), I had it mounted to the wood framing of my garage and moved to to the garage door frame (metal). I've tried grounding the base of the antenna to the house plumbing, but it doesn't do anything measurable (and I get the feeling it shouldn't and I'm doing something glaringly dumb.)

I've looked for installation guides for using mobile antennas at home, but haven't come up with much. Is this even possible?

I'm going through the sub for information, just found a link to k0bg.com, so I'll read up there. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'd really like to get some minimal success, even if short ranged before dropping money into this new hobby... Seems like Canadian prices are high in comparison to US... (a 35$ power supply on amazon.com was 175$ on the .ca site.....)