This test was awesome. I'm in my mid 30s and missed the CB craze. I pulled out an old cobra 25 of my pops 5 or 6 years ago and since then I was hooked. I really enjoy these cheap ideas. Keeps my wheels turning. Appreciate the videos.
Thanks Fred, made me laugh that. I recall my early radio days about '81, my grumpy old dad hated CB with a passion and I wasn't allowed to put an aerial anywhere so I had a DV27 on a roughly cut piece of sheet steel on the inside bottom of my wardrobe with the antenna sticking up into the clothes! Worst bit was I had no tape measure and a little pair of rubbish tin snips so I had to keep trimming bits off the sheet til it fit, but I got it wedged before I cut enough off and when I tried to pull it back out I sliced a big hole in my hand and needed stitches! Ah happy days on my little Commtron! Thanks for bringing back the memories of first steps in radio! 73 from G7RCI (Gremlin)
I knew many people locally in the 80's with coax made dipoles, some even stretched to a 18ft Silver Rod sideways in the loft space. I remember making my 1st dipole and making a ½ decent contact of about 10miles on 6(ish)watts, as a struggling teenager at the time, i could afford decent gear 😀
Back in the day, it was metal dustbin lids we used. Mag mounts or fire sticks were just right. There were lots of bins in our street that were missing a lid. From Pudsey Steeplejack, (that was! ) Thanks 🙏 Eamonn.
Rover biscuit tin outside my bedroom window on the living room bay window roof, with the coax coming through the window jam, freezing in the winter, full of old scrap nuts and bolts or anything else metal I could find. I did manage to fill the tin to the top, I could just lift it at 13 years old. I had the obligatory tin foil as well and I managed to get a Cherokee Dial a Match, bolted to the tin lid down to 1.5.1. The tin foil blew away after a week, it didn't change the VSWR though. I got all over the place with that. That was connected to a Cybernet 1000 with an Altai PSU with the voltage turned up to 16 volts for the important extra 1 watt. I cringe now about the over voltage, it didn't kill the radio though, just extremely bright led's that would light my room up a green glow at night. Happy times and loose girls (sigh) 😉
When I started up around late 80's I had a "smokey bear"(was told that you would win this radio as a prize (don't know how true this is) branded radio with an car battery with a mag mount on a wheelbarrow.. As for the swr I couldn't afford it so I ran the set up for about a year until I eventually borrowed one from a breaker "Night crawler" in milton Keynes but we had to eye ball at the magic roundabout, New Bradwell MK. When I checked the swr I only needed to make a slight adjustment which took ages as I didn't really know what I was doing.. Excellent memories of old great video Fred.
60 now, did exactly the same thing with the tin, fire stick mag mount and coaxial as the ground plane, worked well. Still got my TriStar 747, dusted it off the other day. Tombstone, Alton Hants
Oh man, you brought back some memories. Picked up my first rig from some guy in slough selling rigs from his boot (at night, behind the Three Tuns pub) in the late 70's early 80's. Did almost exactly the same sort of shenanigans as you did here :). G5MAP 73s
I'm a lorry driver in Colorado and at many gravel pits, the scale house uses channel 4 to communicate with all the drivers. The rudimentary base station generally entails a magnet mount whip on the metal roof of the scale house.
I was 12/13 years old and I had a 23 Channel rig pretty basic it was meant for an automobile but I had a 12 volt converter that I used as a power supply, same kind of thing people used on model trains without the rheostat. I had put a 1/2 wave antenna that I strapped to the chimney. The house I lived in was a 3 story tenement. That 1/2 wave antenna was at least 50 feet in the air at it's top. Sometimes I would get atmosphere skip and I would talk to people in Florida and Canada to the north. I lived in Northern Connecticut at the time. Back then it was the height of the CB Craze and before they came out with the 40 channel rigs. The problem with the 40 channel rigs is that they have 1/2 the output that the 23 channel rigs. I guess the FCC figured it was a fair tradeoff for twice the channels. I don't know what atmosphere skip you would get with those. Years later after I graduated from High School I had a buddy that had an illegal FM radio station that put together several CB Radios with unlimited channels with several toggle switches on the side. He would instruct us to set the toggles this way or that way and 4 to 6 of us all over town would talk to each other without any static or idiots listening in. I'm sure we were breaking the law on these sideband channels. 5 years later when I got out of the Air Force 1987, no one really cared to get on the CB. Cell phones started to come out and then we were interested in networking our PC's together. We had the crude BBS systems we setup. I had a BBS with Fido net and people would upload ill gotten gain and would download ill gotten gain. Nothing like sharing stuff that wasn't shareware. Now we have the Internet and most of us are employed in IT still plugging away at nerdy stuff.
My adventure with CB started in 1974 with a cheap Cobra mobile and a Shakespeare base antenna. Graduated to Cobra 1000GTL in 1977, along with that same antenna. Still using CB today - a Galaxy mobile in both the truck and the house, with an Antron 99 antenna on the house and Wilson 2000 antenna on the truck. The wife has a cheap Cobra in her truck today.
This takes me right back to the early 80s, thank you for a fun and interesting channel. I haven't had a CB for 35 years but id love to dabble again a little bit and some sort of loft antenna with a sideband radio look like an easy 'in'. Looking forward to your dipole loft video... it might help me decide what to go with here.
Great video Fred! My first setup was a Granada 23ch AM in a home base unit with built in power supply and SWR meter. Had a 5ft fibreglass helical whip on a car gutter mount attached to the house roof, which was flat steel sheeting thankfully. I made quite a few contacts on that setup back in the 80's, some of which were surprisingly distant to me across the city. Still, locally I was known as a "puny operator" by the big guns with 40ch and SSB into big verticals!
I've been struggling for days to get a good swr on the magnetic antenna on my balcony... Until i found this video. Awesome dude. I taped tinfoil to a piece of wood and lifted the wood up a bit. Magnet on top. Works brilliant !!
My 2m antenna is a 5/8 mag mount on an old pizza baking tray in the attic. I get 70 miles. I used to use a CB mag mount on a radiator in my bedroom. That worked surprisingly well because of all the pipe work.
I also want to add this as a seperate comment from my other one. I put a mobile radio setup using a Galaxy DX99V on my mountain bike back in the late 1990s early 2000s. I made a homemade mirror mount type aluminum mount for the rear bike rack with a heavy duty stud mount and mounted a 102 inch stainless steel whip to it. I used an unmeasured piece of RG8X coax to go from the stud mount up to the handle bars with some slack in it to turn the handle bars left and right. I made a custom removable handlebar mount out of L shaped aluminum stock to hold the radio mounting bracket and radio to my handlebars using u bolts. I also made a custom mounting and hold down system on the rear bike rack to hold the 12 volt 12mAh SLA battery. I did an SWR check after hooking up the radio and the SWR was around a 1.2:1. I then did a signal check with fellow CBer that had a comparable radio in his car but had a Wilson 1000 magnet mounted to his roof. We each spaced out about 25 to 30 feet apart in a parking lot and transmitted seperately in the same direction to the same base station that was about a good 6 or 7 miles away. The person at the base station was checking the recieve signal strength between me and the car. The guy in the car was shocked that the mobile setup on my bike did just as good as his mobile car setup. I also shot skip with the bike setup. I went to a local flat open area cemetary field which was the only large flat open area in my neighborhood. I hit a couple contacts about five or six states away and one of them couldn't believe I was talking to him with a radio setup on a mountain bike.
I used a coffee can recently. As a child in the 70's when I was about 6 years old in 1977, I used a metal tool box with a magnet mount antenna on a 2nd floor porch off my bedroom. These days, I've basically replicated my childhood using a Chameleon Matcher and a steel whip.
I had a modulator on a magmount on my garage roof when I was 9 years old. 1986 next to M1 motorway, my handle was "The Bisto Kid" cos my dad always called me in to make the gravy for dinner
those were the days back in the late 70,s when i got my cb radio from a truck driver from toddington services on the M1. it was a sharp 40 channel radio on AM. I did the same from my parents house in the loft with biscuit tin and tin foil. Those were the days.
Takes me back. My first antenna back in about 1980 was a magnetic mount. I had it stuck to an old piece of metal that was the back cover off a washing machine. Needless to day, it didn't work very well. Eventually I migrated to a 5/8 wave ground plane. 🙂
Always like your videos Freddie! I still like to use VHF/UHF mag-mounts in the house and attic even if I got aerials up outside. It's all fun and I was tickled to see you doing a video on this subject. Thanks! 73, OM
1978 my dad came home with a Pearce Simpson super tiger 40a am radio , and a dv27 , he mounted it on a biscuit tin on the kitchen worktop , I was hooked when I heard voices talking . Since then I've never looked back
Oh Yes. 1980s York JCB 863 with a mag-mount on a biscuit tin. Such fun. Thanks for jogging the memory. My brother and I got in trouble for nicking the kitchen foil!!!!
My first power supply was a car battery I found , Massive big heavy duty white Exide thing That never held a charge 😂 I moved onto a bremi 3amp then a Saturn 5amp transformer
Just recently decided to get back into CB's after a 35yr break. My landlord will not allow an outdoor antenna, so I'm working off a cheap springer mag mount on a baking tray in the loft, plugged into my 6900v. The springer is 5ft, the roof space is only 4ft, so its bent at the top, and to top it off the roof is covered in solar panels. Despite that my swr is 1:2 - 1.4. Static suprisingly is only 2-3. Locally i'm getting out 10miles. It definatley brought back a flood of memories setting it up. My next plan is to try an inverted dipole, when I have the energy to crawl around the loft again lol
HI. Hats off to you for your ingenuity. Getting out 10 miles is really good with the springy. Pity about the solar panels as they are a major source of QRM.
back in 1978 i took an old car hood, bolted some wood blocks to it and set it on the peak of our house's gable roof tied down with rope with a mag mount radio shack whip on it, extended the coax down to my bedroom window and i could talk to contacts 200 miles away every night with a totally stock 23 channel radio shack radio.i also grounded the radio chassis to a cold water pipe to get a really good ground connection. cb was a lot of fun back then, these days it's mostly people goofing around with sound effects and hate preaching....
Love the modulator antenna. Still use it today on the old mag mount. Had the DV27 bolted through a metal sheet (about 4x3') as a kid in the loft and car battery powered Amstrad 901 in my bedroom. Living on a hill about 900ft above sea level, got out pretty well tbh. Later upgraded to a silver rod on the chimney stack :) Have several vintage 27/81 units, including homebase ones, and a Marko 747 & 444.
FUn stuff.... I've been a ham for a long time now but got started on CB back in the 60s. Had a license and everything. Talked all over the place back then. Still do. Side band is great.
Thanks for the happy memories on this one Fred , very happy days , ist rig , General Electric 40ch AM , oh blissful bleed over lol, then the month after mum paid 90 quid for my Ham Int multimode 2 and Turner super sidekick , then it was the 148 mk1 , great days , when I go to Blackpool ( we used to keep a hotel) I always visit the still there T@K brackets .Anyone who is from Blackpool reading this will agree 1979/1981 those two years everyone knew each other not many didn't know who had a rig , it was a great CB Town .thanks Fred
Takes me back to the early 80's again, DV27, Mag n Tin... LCL Rig!!! We lived in a very built up area so only local contacts, used to drive up to The Mermaid Pool near to Buxton in my VW Beetle (The Perfect Ground Plane), mag mounted 4' Firestick or K40 smack in the middle of the roof, on Legal FM I used to get into Liverpool, Warrington, Derby, Nottingham.. Then I got my Major SSB rig and straight into Spain on good skip... Good times :-) Anyone remember the Lowe Electronics TX40 rig, from Matlock Derbyshire? I had one my self, brilliant mid priced piece of kit.
Been there, done that!! You had me smiling from beginning to end!! Thanks for the trip way-back!! I'm still cb-ing, got a classic RCA Co-Pilot 14T302 SSB. Lovin' it!! Keep it up Fred, can't wait for your dipole video!! Norman in Canada.
@@CB-RADIO-UK: 73s back atcha Brother Fred!! How long do we have to wait for the dipole video?! I'm on pins & needles all-a-twitter-anxious for the vid, bro!!!! Have you dx'd to Canada lately?! 🇨🇦+🇬🇧=👍
Blast from the past. Love it Fred. Brought back happy memories from when I got my first radio back in 1977 the old AM days. I had a midland 100M and the Ariel was a DV27 on a quality street tin. Lol
My parents got me into radio at an early age by buying me my first one before I’d started school. Next it was on to 1940’/50’s tube radios but after my father and i went to watch Smokey And The Bandit in 77 things changed as i got my very own AM CB soon after watching it. That didn’t last long as everyone my age and older moved to FM in 80/81 especially after CB went legal. My parents got me a GAP-27 and a York JCB 863 and though saving money and trading i eventually ended up with a Jumbo.
Really good to see some fun light hearted videos about where we all began. I used canes and Aluminium tape which incidentally is a known way of building an Entire Antenna. Loving the videos keep them flowing.
Thanks for that Fed. That brought back memories. Biscuit tin with mag mount + DV27 out on the bedroom window sill. Using a Fidelity 1000 and a Maxcom 4E Worked great too 😀. 73 from Broadsword - 108DD091 up in Scotland.
Another favourit of the time was the dipole , Two 8.5 ft lenghs of 13amp wire one to the dialectic and the outer braid . Laid out in an L shape up a wall swr'd in worked a treat all you had to buy was the coax and pl259 plug
Thank you for showing this. I asked a similar question about using a mag base on a hot water heater in the attic in a FB group and all I got back was mean sneers and sarcastic remarks. This is supposed to be fun!
Late 80s I bought cobra 19x 40ch alfa Mike a dv27 two 6ft lengths of sheep mesh and biscuit tin, even got into south America with it I still have dv27 you cant get one now Ace vid mate....561ET
Great video Fred, this brngs back so many happy memories as a child chatting to folks from the 'homebase' and foot mobile with a 6 channel hand held. Went all over the local town for mobile eyeballs, that nowadays would have the adults probably arrested for speaking to kids and meeting up with them, simpler times back then :)
I had to laugh when I heard the year you bought your mag mount antenna - I was born in 82! I got into CB little by little, originally as a coms method between my buddies and me when we went off roading. We settled on CB because it's better than the crap 2w GMRS hand helds we have in Canada, and it's extremely cheap. My first setup was a radio shack mag mount antenna and a Uniden Pro538w that I bought together for 20 Canuck bucks off Craigslist. I still have that Uniden, and have upgraded my mobile antenna to a 4' firestick. I've since been charmed by CB and gotten my wife a little Realistic mini cb for her van, and I'm now messing around with getting a base station tuned up. For me, part of the charm of CB is that it's old tech, and playing around with it sort of connects you to an earlier, simpler time. Cheers from across the pond!
I had a DV27 on 4 steel strips in a cross shape in the loft in 1978. Biscuit tins are OK at UHF but useless at 27 Mhz. The size of groundplane needed depends on frequency as I am sure you know now Fred.
My first CB antenna at 13-14 years old (68-69) was on my dad's barn roof, I got the idea from one of his books. it was two squares of wire, on short posts, with insulators and each side of a square was 8 feet long. So two square horizontal loops made of 32 feet of wire each and rigged as a dipole?? 300 ohm ribbon or twisted pair brought it down to a toy CB radio I got for Christmas the year before. It got 8 miles out on it. It was an even better listening antenna for shortwave when I moved that way with an Knight ocean hopper regenerative radio. Dad had saved the antenna when I moved out and so I still have it (all bunched up now) 51 years later. In 73 I had a car and could afford a six channel push button CB mobile, called a micro 66 with a base loaded CB mobile antenna when the CB craze hit here,. I still have a cross made of foil up in my present attic from a decade ago, conductive gold Mylar picnic table cloths were added to hopefully increase the area, I still use it from time to time as a ground plane. But most of my stuff is horizontal and it acts more as a shield now. The mount is a 4 by 4 electrical handy box, and used just for antenna mounting and testing.. (HOA restrictions here, no outside antennas allowed.) i still build and experiment with stealth antennas for shortwave and CB..
I enjoy your videos Fred and decided to try CB out. My antenna hasn’t arrived yet but I managed to get across town on the biscuit tin and cheap magmount today, my first contact 👍🏼
great video Fred, as i said in 81 i was running a dv27 on a sheet of steel about 6ft x 4ft in the loft from a Harvard good buddy @4W probably closer to 3.5W getting out 10 miles or so most days. this was just before the Christmas boom clogged the airwaves to death
Ha ha! Reminds me of my very first set up in early 1981. Colt 210 AM rig (brand new at the time which I still have and still works perfectly!) and a DV27 on an old 'Family Circle' biscuit tin in my converted attic bedroom. It got me out on the air around town which was good enough for me at the time, despite the band being chock-a-block and wall-to-wall daytime skip. Most of my chit chat at home tended to be very late at night/early hours anyway so the band was clearer then too.
I liberated an old mini cooper car bonnet and attached some old copper wire to each corner with woodscrews to each corner then put it on the garage roof . Along with a dv27, an old nackered car battery and a charger . happy days, much more fun than a mobile phone or the tinternet lol
Just a couple years ago I put my $15 Wal-Mart mag mount antenna on top of my water heater and talked from NJ to an oil rig off Louisiana and a guy in Kentucky like they were standing next to me on a SKIP. Off a totally stock base radio !
Great video,many happy thoughts from summer 1980, president veep am rig, then a new formac 88, flick it high was the big deal in York, 80 channel am rig was so cool, I use 2 mag mounts these days on my house roof here in finland for local radio, house roof is metal so, big ground plane, Use the A99 for dx, still no 305 net for 2 months now reaching Finland, Germany and France are in and out. Thanks Fred for the fun side of radio.
My first 'twig' was a magmout on an old galvanised coal bunker lol, it got out ok. Biscuit 🍪 tin & happy memories, did you take out all the biscuits first 😉😉👍 cheers Fred
Wonderful to see/hear how utterly civilized CB is, in the UK!! Pretty much the same courtesy as you might expect from ham in the US! CB in the US, although full of perfectly nice people, is still littered with '70s jargon, and unless you're running a fairly high-powered linear amp, good luck finding your way through the license-free US CB jungle!! :-)
I never had a base CB but when I was 17 (here in the USA in 1994) cell phone services were just starting to become affordable. I hated the idea of having to pay for a service that I really didn't need so I told my friends if they wanted to talk to me, get a CB radio. There was about 20 of us cruising all around our county talking back and forth. It was really awesome... and you didn't have to pay a monthly service like a cell. I'd throw my cell phone away in a heartbeat if I could get everyone I care to talk to back on a CB. I do highly suggest everyone installs a CB radio in their pickup truck or car if you travel allot. Truck drivers can tell you about road conditions, current weather, locations of police radar, etc... Also if you are in a wreck and can't get cell service, here in the States channel 9 is used to report an emergency. So CBs aren't just fun, they can be very useful.
I've Enjoy your video it brings back the old days in 1979 I had and still got it Jaws M2 with DV27 on the biscuits tin in the loft and every Channels was packed I use to wait for the TV to close down cus I was causing TVI and I was was taking away from 1am till 4 am and I had to go school great days
LOL. In the late 70s I had a Sears mobile CB on a power supply with a through the roof mobile antenna mounted on a metal box not much bigger than your tin. I talked quite a bit on that before I finally got a half wave dipole mounted outside with the coax through the a window on the same rig. Flashbacks for sure.
Bro, the commercial is the guy from Blues Brothers. He’s the singer from the Good Ole Boys at Bob’s county bunker - where they both kinds of music, country and western
I remeber doing this at the start and then as i got more into it i picked up a k40 i did not have the magmount it was the standard bootlid or gutter mount up the old loft with it my loft was massive back then i somehow i ended up with 10ft long L shaped peice of metal i can not remember wither it was stainless steal or what material it was made of with it being L shaped i could lay it along the lost and clamp the k40 onto it Amazing results 1 of the best singles i ever got
CB is very different across the pond than it is here in the states. We can't legally use FM or venture beyond 27.405. Our entire band is 26.965 to 27.405 AM or SSB only. However, millions break the rules and run all the way to just under the 10 meter amateur band and well below channel one. They also run thousands of watts of power. Our FCC does little to nothing to police the band.
We used to place the mobile mag mount antenna on a steel patio table, which provided a decent ground plane to talk several miles. CB was the 'original social media'! Tons of fun meeting new people at 'eyeballs' (public gatherings of CB'ers)!
I had a friend with that kind of setup on his bedroom floor (no foil). I could hear him in the next street, but i don't remember how well it worked for him.
Yeah if the loft was out the tin in the corner of the bedroom. :-). Back then even 1 mile was enough to get some decent contacts. those were the days :-)
@@CB-RADIO-UK He lived in a block of flats so he had no loft, he couldn't put any antennas up, that was about 1982, a long time ago now, we were just kids.
NightHawk, tried this with wires coming from the tin to act as a ground plane, only 13 knew no better. Had a firestick and a Fidelity 3000 Homebase. Do miss the later years of CB with my Ham International Jumbo and Concord 2, oh and my Hygain V with "that" Rodger bleep! Happy times, the internet came along and It died.
Takes me back - I gave up in the end (I borrowed a mate's mag mount for our boarded out loft), bought a HW dipole instead (easy to fit, bungalow on a hill👍😄😄) and then I bought a SWR meter/matcher with money from my first job. Hacking holes in stepmonster's car, to mount an antenna was fun though, it's was my step brother's idea - we copped it, he told me he'd cleared it with her 😊👍✌️😄😄🤔🤔🙄🙄😄😄😄
Oh Fred, you got me reminiscing now. I built a dipole with 15mm copper pipe as the main element. On a Wednesday night I would be on with the local 39 club trying to get copies from south lincs over the water to Hunstanton. My first FM rig was the 40ch handheld from Tandy. Not satisfied with that I mounted a full rig to my handlebars and put a car battery on my bike carrier and cycled down to the sea bank at Gedney Drove End to get copies to Hunstanton .....proper DXing !
What would be the best aerial to put on a big old metal water tank that’s no longer being used in the loft? We can’t attach an external one unfortunately
Lmao that is how I got started Fred back in the 80s as a kid. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂, used to love listening to the adult conversations. I don't know what became of a breaker called aztec he had all the best gear. (torbay). I still have my amstrad :)
