while i can't honestly say that i'm a fan of drilling the holes in the front plastic, i also can't say that i've never drilled holes in a radio for a customer.
on my madison, it's not actually a frequency counter, it's a frequency display.
so i misspoke earlier when i called it a counter. (mine is the MB8719 madison BTW)
I didn't like the noise that came along with the multiplexing of the digits on the old blue freq counter i had in there previously. It may not be audible on your radio, but with the LEDs as big as they are in mine, the noise was noticeable.
Also, being mounted right above the volume control doesn't help!
so for this incarnation i chose to go with a display since it won't cause ANY extra noise and i like an ultra quiet receive for DXing.
the caveat is that it won't track with the clarifier, and my clarifier is a 10 turn pot that slides 12khz. (6 down and 6 above the channel) so i needed a way to know when i was actually on the center of the CB channel.
That's what the green LED is. It turns red when you go below the channel, and green when you go above the channel. The circuit doesn't work quite as well as i had hoped, and im still looking for a better solution, but this project is so far on the back burner now that i just kind of deal with it as it does work well enough.
If you take the front panel off, you can see on the inside of the window for the old clock that there is a recess, and you can cut a 1/8" piece of smoke plexi (can buy on ebay)
to fit right in there. This will cut the glare of that counter and hide the insides of the radio better.
also, if that counter is too bright for you, there is probably an IC shaped resistor pack or two that you can increase the value of in order to decrease the brightness.
LC