Another way to hear SSB on your 27 MHz AM CB 

Not quite. But I can certainly do things with stock cubes. Stay tuned ...

I did this when I was a kid to provide a BFO for my consumer grade shortwave receiver (National Panasonic radio that my uncle brought back from overseas). I did build a 455 kHz BFO but it was very finicky to adjust in both level (thus causing problems with overload) and frequency, and found another transistor radio right next to the case of the NP receiver was easier to use. All that was happening was one of the signals generated within the other transistor radio was on the right frequency to beat with the incoming RF signal or the 455 kHz IF inside the NP receiver, thus detecting SSB and CW. Moving the other transistor radio away from the NP receiver provided the BFO level control necessary to prevent overload under weak signal conditions. :)

Yes it does work, I've demonstrated the process using various portables... always fun 👍

i did it too when i was a kid, using two radios.

Yes you get the other radio local oscillator on the other radio rx frequency and it usually leaks so much you can pick it up, all you need is a carrier for to decode the ssb. On ham radio settups this is called rf gain, you usualy have a controll on fast or slow and also a some way to manually adjust the carrier strength. Doing manual with am, you ged bought side bands, so if you have a busy band, you will get a lot of crap from the other side band

@@kristiangronberg3150 does this work better on some types of radios than others?

Nah. I was doing this sort of thing in 1960. That's old! :)

@@johnwest7993 The 60's? No-one remembers the 60's! Anyone who says they remember the 60's wasn't actually there. :D Seriously though, I was doing this in the early to mid 70s.

I won't be building anything though.

@@vk3ye I knew I'd get it wrong 😁, clever idea by adding a carrier near the same signal strength, I wonder if you could do the same thing with a GDO and also on a short wave AM receiver, interesting video Peter I'll wait next time before I leave a comment. Cheers Adam G7CRQ

You were right in that the nanoVNA is effectively acting as a BFO but at RF instead of IF.

SSB has no carrier wave, so you provide that with the VNA and you'll hear SSB as it was AM.. yes.

The only bass players that think using a pick is illegal are those who cannot think out of the box (bass player joke).

@@MirlitronOne I resemble that joke While I do do reasonable impersonations of a guitarist, I am A bass player. You’ll never catch me playing bass like a frustrated guitarist. I have been called out for playing guitar like a frustrated bass player. Kind of makes me a below average guitarist However, what separates me from all the other below average guitarists out there….. Being a bass player….. I know when *not* to play

Davie504 approves this comment.

@@BentConrod Davie504 needs a slap

I didn't try it but an interesting experiment. I'd imagine it would need more output to break through for sufficient level.

Yes, IF would work. But may be harder to get sufficient injection in unless you poke a wire inside the CB.

I suspect a bit of insulated wire from the nanoVNA fed through a hole in the chassis and not connected to anything inside may be better than connecting it direct to the chassis. Even not feeding the wire through the chassis might work, given the poor IF isolation of the typical consumer-grade radio.

VFO

What ???? What happened ?

CW fixes that

@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan Very good point! 👍😉

@@SpinStar1956 it fixed me. I’m dreadful with a microphone. I tend to think with my mouth open and have a knack of combining humour with brutal honesty that has had me kicked out of places that shouldn’t have let me in in the first place. While I’m not very good at it, I mostly use CW….even in the car….while driving. Surprisingly straight forward and not that more distracting that talking to your passenger

@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan My problem is that I didn't have a good set-up for SSB when I first started in amateur radio (insufficient power, inadequate antenna), and also the tones in my voice were wrong. So I have this *ingrained sense of a morbid distrust* of SSB, i.e. if I fire up the radio on SSB then I have this "I can try answering this DX station, but I won't be surprised if they cannot hear me" thought in the back of my mind. What compounded this distrust was when I got my full call licence, an elderly friend (who'd also sat the upgrade test at the same time as me but failed, sadly, and then went SK before he was mentally prepared to sit the test again) loaned me his TS-520S that he didn't need (he had a nice, new TS-530) and *deliberately* didn't remind me to take the mic with me when I picked it up. He was a dyed-in-the-wool CW operator. :) So I had no choice but to use CW if I wanted to get on 20m, and accordingly the vast majority of QSOs in my early logs are CW. He did loan me the mic later, but I rarely used it except in across-the-suburb rag chews with friends. My early experience was quite frustrating because two of my closest friends of the same age and licence capability seemed to be able to work DX by the bagful using SSB *without* any need for a speech processor. Most of my DX, contesting, etc, is via CW ever since. As I saw in one comment on social media about 15 years ago: _If God wanted us to use SSB he would've given us only one nostril!_ To be fair, though, things have turned around a bit since then. I have owned or do own radios with decent speech compressors, e.g. TS-180S with an IF speech compressor and filtering at both front and tail ends of the IF strip! People tell me when they hear me using that it's as if I have a big linear using VOX - nothing then the S-meter goes *whack* but it's good quality audio. The other radio with a decent compressor is the TS-480HX which can do 200W PEP barefoot. I bought a reasonable audio compressor and Heil mic insert (as a kit) for the FT-817, and people say that sounds really good too.

@@vk2ig there’s something unambiguous bout communicating in CW on the ham bands, while rag chew is a challenge, and it what attracts me most to CW is having a conversation I have a bunch of studio gear, Heil, BeesNeez, Michael Joly microphones, and some nice mic pre’s, compressors and such, but I haven’t gone to the trouble of hooking them up. The other thing that draws me to CW is I can operate at night while everyone is in bed. That said, I’ve had complaints of the solid clack clack clack of some of my old brass keys I’ve acquired.