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Old 8th Feb 2017, 12:49 am   #101
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Default Re: All about CB radio

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its telescopic aerial screwed into the stud mount on the rear, pointing bolt upright.
Well yes, but there's a 'knuckle' joint at the base of the aerial so it can actually point in any direction you want it to. When in its 'pack' it would have been worn over the shoulder like a satchel, with the aerial going up the side of the radio in a vertical direction. With this in mind, it 'could' have had a speaker in the case, except it would then point inwards to the operators body with the radio 'hung' the normal way round. So definitely, speaker in the handset was the way to go.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 12:55 am   #102
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Yes, I remember seeing theirs being used in 'Handbag' mode as well. I can't remember, does it power-manage the channel display or does it stay on all the time?

The Realistic TRC1001 (mentioned earlier) had a timed dimmer on the channel LEDs so they would go off after a few seconds for power conservation purposes. Moving the channel switch made them come back on for a while, or there was a small 'dimple' switch built into the PTT lever button which you could use to wake up the channel LEDs if you wanted to remind yourself which channel you were on.

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Old 8th Feb 2017, 1:37 am   #103
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I can remember how much I wanted to own a proper 40ch handheld CB back in the early 1980s. I actually made my own 1 channel AM handheld CB for CH19 but it was really just a low power novelty item.

However, when I did finally get a 40ch FM handheld CB (Harvard 410?) I can remember leaving the house with it and talking on air with it as I walked down to the local shops. I can still remember seeing all the cars driving past me on the main road and it suddenly dawned on me that I probably looked a bit of a dick walking along with a huge handheld CB with its long shiny whip antenna. I switched it off and stuffed it inside my coat and the dream was over in a flash... Never used a handheld CB since that moment
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 1:50 am   #104
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The same friends who had the Porta-Pack just mentioned also had a Harvard 410T as well, which they used until it fell apart completely. It was quite lightly built compared to the Realistics but it worked very well with very nice TX audio, I seem to remember.

As self-certified nerds, we were completely unselfconscious about what we looked like using these things - as Biggles said earlier, CB was the mobile comms technology of the day. Its usefulness so outweighed the drawbacks that we were prepared to put up with minor hindrances like 6-foot-long aerials.

If you fast-forwarded just a few years you would begin to see people walking around with Motorola 'Brick' phones which look ridiculous to most modern eyes (although I happen to think they are a modern design classic) but the same thing applied - their usefulness outweighed any misgivings about what the user might look like using them.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 2:32 am   #105
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I'm not normally a self conscious person but I definitely have an issue with stuff like this... I wouldn't want to use a CB or ham handheld in a busy public area.

I did have a 2m handheld at around the same time and I used to bring it with me each weekend on my motorbike. I had a proper dirt bike converted for road use and I used to ride it off road (green laning) and the little AOR 240 was my lifeline if I ever fell off and broke a leg and got stranded in the middle of nowhere. It was much smaller than a CB handheld and there were a couple of repeaters in the local area as well as simplex. But luckily I never needed it. I've still got it somewhere but it hasn't been used since the 1990s.

Quite a few handheld CBs passed through my hands for repair and I can remember one model that had a tiny channel readout in a little recess. I think it used a rotary drum with 01 to 40 on the outside and a single lamp in the recess. It worked surprisingly well on test gear and when testing it from the house. It was quite an ugly thing and I'm pretty sure it was a UK FM CB but I tried googling for the model number but couldn't spot it in all the google images. I think it had a brand name that was well known but I can't remember which one...
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 7:53 pm   #106
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That design rings a bell for me as well but I can't bring a brand name to mind. There's a nice page full of CB handhelds here: Dutch, but some interesting looking radios.

http://cbmuseum.nl/Walky_Talky.htm

The TRC-209 pictured there is the original AM version of what became the TRC1001 (FM) in the UK. I can remember seeing two or three of the Hy-Gain ones, one an 80-channel variant, but looking at that page it seems to have been sold with other badges as well, such as Lafayette.

Do any of those look like the radio you were thinking of? I know you said you thought it was a UK radio, but, as with the TRC209 / TRC1001, there was often a UK FM version of an originally AM USA / European model.

I used to do a lot of solo walking in some very lonely parts of the UK and my amateur handheld and the repeaters it could reach were likewise an important resource for me in the early to mid nineties before mobile phones became genuinely affordable.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 8:49 pm   #107
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This is not the one we were thinking of, but an interesting hybrid anyway, the Binatone Longranger 40. It has the usual 2-digit LED channel display, but the channel switch also has the channel numbers screenprinted around it, and the channel display can be turned off to conserve power.

http://radiopics.com/CB%20Radio/UK%2...anger%2040.htm

Also available as the Longranger 6 and Longranger 12 (the model suffix referring to the number of channels that each set had), neither of which had the channel display.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 9:15 pm   #108
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Ah, what about this one: Maxcom 7E?

Also badged as the Midland 'Ready-Rescue'
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 9:22 pm   #109
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I did have a 2m handheld at around the same time and I used to bring it with me each weekend on my motorbike. I had a proper dirt bike converted for road use and I used to ride it off road (green laning) and the little AOR 240 was my lifeline if I ever fell off and broke a leg and got stranded in the middle of nowhere. It was much smaller than a CB handheld and there were a couple of repeaters in the local area as well as simplex. But luckily I never needed it. I've still got it somewhere but it hasn't been used since the 1990s.
Is the handheld CB you're referring to this one? http://www.radiopics.com/CB%20Radio/...vard_WT-44.htm
I had a couple of these back in the day.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 9:40 pm   #110
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Ah, what about this one: Maxcom 7E?

Also badged as the Midland 'Ready-Rescue'
I have the Midland version of this one.

It comes in a plastic box carrier with a retractable Mag mounted aerial , a real nice piece of kit.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 9:55 pm   #111
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Is the handheld CB you're referring to this one? http://www.radiopics.com/CB%20Radio/...vard_WT-44.htm
I had a couple of these back in the day.
Yes that looks like it. Harvard WT-44. However, I'm fairly certain that it had 40 channels and not 2 channels so I think the info in that link is wrong.

I can remember it because of the very tiny channel readout in the recess and also because an internal wire fell off inside it whilst I was testing it and it shorted the nicads inside. The handheld turned into a smoke bomb with smoke (impressively) flying out of every orifice at high pressure. I can remember thinking "should I drop it now or try and do something about it?"
It didn't hurt or even get that hot and the show was over in a few seconds before I could do anything. Not sure how much it affected the health of the nicads but the wires were reduced to brittle black metal strips. I replaced the wiring inside and it was fine again.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 10:05 pm   #112
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This Youtube video illustrates the ultra-mini channel display on the WT-44 quite well:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFBQdns7L6Y

I've never actually seen one before.
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Old 8th Feb 2017, 10:39 pm   #113
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Regarding home constructed CB transceivers I remember making an AM low power job around the time when CB was just gaining popularity but before I had enough money to buy one. There were quite a few people in the village with home bases installed (I installed them!) so I discovered that you could actually transmit quite a distance using a half wave dipole and about 100mW. I only had a couple of channels and I seem to remember using radio control crystals? probably bought cheaply from The Model Shop on Blenheim Street in Newcastle (Remember that Sirius?) now sadly demolished. The receiver was a single conversion superhet with an IF of 455KHz and worked reasonably well. I think some of the CB channels shared frequencies with the old 27MHz radio controlled models at the lower end of the band. I seem to remember a bit of conflict between the two factions in those days. Not surprising really.
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Old 9th Feb 2017, 12:03 am   #114
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Briefly OT: Yes, that was a brilliant model shop. Three storeys high. I still miss it.

Most 'proper' AM CB walkie talkies used a single conversion superhet, therefore a pair of crystals 455Khz apart. The same went for 27Mhz RC gear.

It was not unheard of for people to buy a pair of RC crystals for a CB handheld and put the RX crystal in the transmitter and the TX crystal in the receiver, thus neatly avoiding direct conflict with the modellers.

The same thing couldn't be done, even if you wanted to, with FM walkie talkies because, with no VCO to modulate, the modulator wiggled the TX crystal frequency instead. But crystals being crystals, they wouldn't wiggle (deviate) very far off frequency. So, in FM sets the TX crystal was operated at 1/2 TX frequency and then doubled. That had the intended effect of also doubling the deviation, but it meant that the TX / RX crystals couldn't simply be swapped.

By about 1979 it was possible to order pairs of crystals for any FCC / Euro CB channel from dealers in Europe.

Did anyone else have F.G. Rayer's book 'How To Make Walkie Talkies' (Babani)? I still have mine somewhere.
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Old 9th Feb 2017, 1:08 am   #115
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Did anyone else have F.G. Rayer's book 'How To Make Walkie Talkies' (Babani)? I still have mine somewhere.
Yes, I've got an old copy here. I used this book to help me make my 1 channel AM CB for CH19 27.185MHz.
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Old 9th Feb 2017, 12:23 pm   #116
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I can't remember, does it power-manage the channel display or does it stay on all the time?
It's not automatic. It has a 'push off - push on' switch combined with the volume control to turn off the LED displays to power save when on batteries.
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Old 10th Feb 2017, 7:38 pm   #117
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In around 1984-1985 I was given, non-working, a Realistic TRC-1005 which was a rather smaller and neater radio than the TRC-1001, had all the same functionality and connectivity and crucially, just a few years on from the TRC-1001, had an LCD display rather than an LED one so its power consumption in standby was much improved without the inconvenience of having no channel display most of the time.

At the time Tandy UK were alive and well and so I ordered a service manual, followed by the parts necessary to fix it - mostly, someone had wrecked all the coil cores so badly that they couldn't just be unscrewed from the bottom end of the coil and put back in the other way with the unbroken end upwards, as was sometimes possible. I did eventually nurse it back from the dead.

But that meant I had two full featured 40 channel handhelds and a friend didn't have one at all. Although the 1005 was a smaller, more modern radio I just couldn't part with the old 1001, so I ended up giving him the 1005 and still have the 1001 to this day. I lost touch with him years ago, but I would like to hope he still has the 1005 somewhere.

I never saw the 'final' generation UK 40-channel Realistic handheld, the TRC-1007. It would be nice to lay hands on one just to see how it compares with the first / second generation models.

I've also never seen any of the later, much smaller generation of CB handhelds like the Maycom AH-27 or Midland 42. Some features from that later generation I do like, like the ham-style swappable battery packs, but some I don't like, like the lack of a decently long aerial - having used push-on 'ducks' on my CB handhelds at various times (when operating indoors or walking under trees) I know that most of the time, a short helical aerial just won't cut it on 27Mhz. At least with the old radios you had the option to raise a decent aerial when you needed it.
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Old 20th Feb 2017, 3:44 pm   #118
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I was on the phone to a friend who I haven't seen in a while last night, and in passing conversation we got talking about the old days (90s) DXing on 11M.

Anyway, it turns out he's got a good dozen or so CB's in his loft, and amongst them is a Stalker 9 and a box full of Realistic Handheld's & a few mobile Realistic rigs. He's mailing the job lot over to me for £50, so I'll post an image of them when they get here.

If I remember rightly, I momentarily had a Stalker 9 many moons ago but it only had 20 odd UK FM channels & mid band but was multi mode - so I'm looking forward to seeing one of those again.
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Old 20th Feb 2017, 6:17 pm   #119
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If the Stalker IX you've bought is the 'Made for UK' version (IX F-DX?) you might be pleasantly surprised to find that it has the 27/81 channels as standard and even has a CB/27/81 logo next to the channel switch.

New out of the box, it was a straightforward 40 channel FM radio with a lot of mysteriously unmarked / undedicated positions on the front panel rotary switches.

If it's a IX-F-DX, That radio alone is probably worth rather more than you paid for the whole box.
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Old 20th Feb 2017, 7:16 pm   #120
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-Web image of the UK version of the 9F-DX. Not as many undedicated switch positions as I remembered - maybe I was thinking of the Nato 2000?
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