UK CB radio 30th anniversary

[murphyv310]

Drat!

[mark pirate]

Another CB for my collection, a Uniden 620 pro homebase, cept 40 channel.
I picked this up a couple of weeks ago for a fiver, it has cleaned up like new, the only fault was a sticking signal meter, took all of ten mins to sort it.

Skip must be up, as bringing in loads of german breakers

Mark

[trickie_dickie]

I still have my original "Jaws mk11". (Am I allowed to mention it on here?)

[mark pirate]

Today (2nd november) is the official 30th anniversary of legal uk cb radio.
I will be hooking mine up later to see if anyone out there will be celebrating, will you be on the one-nine?

Mark

[davegsm82]

Got back from watching bill bailey live, made a cuppa, put the home made antenna up, turned on the CB, what did I hear?

Bot all.

Nothing.

Oh well, I guess I'll wait until the end of the month and try again?

Dave.

[Techman]

Same here

Had a listen around 11 metres on the old 'tron' & there was just odd carrier wave noise & nothing else. Having said that, I'm using the outer of the TV coax to receive on!

The Dynatron is one of the very few (perhaps only) domestic radios (radiograms) to receive 11 metres & it does pull in CB stuff quite well as long as it's AM or FM. Things were much the same on a little 'hand held' that I still keep a set of batteries in too.

The 'tron' is 'conquering the ether'.........but not on this occasion

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by davegsm82

Got back from watching bill bailey live, made a cuppa, put the home made antenna up, turned on the CB, what did I hear?

Dave, you can't be serious - what time was this?

I put my Binatone 5-Star - the very same radio I used on the first night in 1981 - in the car and went for a drive out around the area, down south to the Durham moors, west over to Hartside Height on the A689 in east Cumbria and then back to Tyneside via Alston / Haydon Bridge

Channel 30 and sometimes the ones immediately up and down from it were humming from 7pm - there was a gent sitting high up in Gateshead that I could initially hear as I approached Hexham (A69) and heard him all the way home. He was on until at least 10.00pm. You couldn't possibly -not- have heard him in Blyth. Perhaps you didn't get in until later - the event only officially spanned 7pm-9pm, in any case.

Because the activity was so high on 30, your local northumbrian network chaired by a gent in... yes... Blyth! moved to channel 31, and I could hear them all (strength 1, but very clear) from the moors between Stanhope and Middleton. Unfortunately they couldn't hear me when I tried to call in - I had zero background noise levels in my remote location, whereas they were probably being assailed by digital noise from computers, etc.

The most interesting (local) news of the day for me was that the gent up in Gateshead had unboxed a previously never-used 1981 vintage York 861 and put it on-air earlier in the day, specially for the occasion.

[Techman]

I'm starting to regret not having made the effort to get something properly set up so that I could have had a proper go, but what with work etc. etc. etc. - here I go making excuses again, etc. etc.......

[davegsm82]

Sirius,

I don't know what happened then, I usually get excellent results on the DIY-Twig, I've pulled in a lot of chatter from this side of newcastle before, but last night was dead!

Maybe it was the rain affecting play?

Dave.

[mark pirate]

There was a bit of life here, i had a chat with a couple of people, but no one realised this was the 30th anniversary though.

I really should have a go at making a diy aerial, i was using a firestick (remember them?) mounted on a large metal groundplane, the rig used was a Rotel RVC240.

Mark

[mark pirate]

A new addition to the CB collection was added today, a very rare Uniden 934mhz rig, these never caught on, it seems to be working, now to make up an aerial...

Mark

[murphyv310]

Hi Guys.
Darren from the mod team kindly forwarded an Email that was received from a Chap in NI, this was Terry Walsh's Nephew. Terry was on of my regular contacts on CB back in the 80's whom I mentioned on an earlier post in this thread.

I received this E-Mail this morning and I would like to share it with you all as it is very interesting.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, Terry often talked about his radio contacts with Scotland. I am trying to remember his call sign, I know it gave him a great deal of pleasure.

Terry, for most of his life acted as a full time carer for his father Bertie Walsh. who was also very interested in radio, Bertie, I think, was president of The Radio Society of GB (Ham Radio). I know that in their house in Cushendun, they had entire room set aside as a radio room. When his father died Terry was able to marry May Leavey, my aunt, and they were together until Terry after a short illness died in April 1995 and is buried in the local cemetry in Cushendun. Terry was always interested and participated in everything from rally driving, go karting, shark fishing, shooting, the list goes on. For some time he was a member of the Royal Observer Corps, when they excisited. they had an observation post nearby.

I have attached a photo that shows Terry, it must be in the early 60's. He is at the the back of the boat by the engine. The other man is David his brother. I am the boy with his hands in his pockets with the white shirt. This was when he was into water skiing and just bought the boat.

A little story that you may not have heard before, Terry in the 60's took it into his head to go to a Government Surplus auction at an airfield in Antrim. He ended up buying an ex- RAF airfield, self propelled, snow plough, a massive yellow thing that sucked up the snow and blew it out to the side. he took it home and stored it in their barn. When the winter came and the snow fell. Terry for a consideration offered his services with the snow plough to the local farmers. The local council hearing of his exploits got in touch and made him an offer that he could not refuse, for the snow plough. He made a nice little profit.

In his later years Terry never seemed to slow down, always changing his cars etc. he was always upto something. He would annually drive down to visit us and our other relatives in the south of England, thinking nothing of the long drive from Stranraer to Southampton.

Finally having retired my wife and I have moved back to Cushendun. The sad thing is that Terrys family house is about to be demolished as the new owners have built a new large house on the lawn in front of it and will move in on its completion. The last of the contacts with the past. (attached a photo of his house)

I hope this has been of interest to you and please keep in touch. Let me know if you venture across to The Glens of Antrim and perhaps we could arrange to meet up.

If you look at www.cushendunweb.co.uk it has information and many photos of Cushendun. I manage the site for the local community group and try to keep it upto date.

All the best and thanks again for getting in touch

Danny Beaven

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by mark pirate

A new addition to the CB collection was added today

Good find, Mark.

Ironically, the service which killed off 934Mhz by taking over its frequencies(Analogue cellphones) is now itself dead. There must be loads of surplus ex-cellphone RF devices / PA devices which would now make production of 934Mhz radios very cheap in a way that was never possible when the band was actually in use for CB. Although a committed CB fan, I could never justify the purchase of a 934Mhz radio for what I deemed was very expensive equipment likely to have poor range over anything other than a line of sight path.

I'm sure the authorities originally chose high UHF/Low Microwave for CB or ('Open Channel' as they insisted on calling it originally) because:

1) Putting it so high meant that any resultant harmonics would not interfere with any of the prime services (broadcast, emergency and PMR) using lower frequencies in the VHF to UHF range.

2) The technology would be so hideously expensive that the system would die from low user take-up, so the government could say that they had made CB available but nobody wanted it after all.

Nowadays, I wish I had ventured into that world while it was still legally possible. There seems little point in owning just one radio now, but I suppose if you do have one, that's one less to have to find.

UK CB was great in the days when radios were so expensive that only people who were seriously into it were prepared to pay for radios - once they became affordable, the quality of operators and operational courtesy plummeted like a stone. 934Mhz never did become cheap, so for the few who could afford it I can imagine that it must have been a blessed refuge from all of the problems on 27Mhz.

[electronicskip]

Sorry I just stumbled on this older thread.
I got the bug in the early days before 27/81, joined a CB Club, did the eyeball thing, treasure hunts etc. and loved every moment of it.
I still use CB radio to this day, I've got one installed permanently in my car (Binatone 5 star) and I've currently got about 40 or 50 of them in various states of working/non working order.

The local car boot sale near to me seems to be good pickings for this sort of thing including old taxi transceivers too, I only ever pay up to a tenner max.

[colourking]

Originally Posted by SiriusHardware

Ironically, the service which killed off 934Mhz by taking over its frequencies(Analogue cellphones) is now itself dead. .

Digital mobile phone (i.e. GSM) extended into the spectrum used by analogue mobile phone networks as that was phased out. That spectrum is far from dead. So it would not be a good idea to try transmitting with an old 934MHz UK CB! (except into a dummy load). If you try receiving you will probably encounter buzzy type sounds from base station signals (934MHz falls in the spectrum used by the base stations).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands

[AC/HL]

It would appear that 934 is no longer legal in the UK, so please do not discuss it further.