130 replies to this topic

[phils sprite]

intresting chat and you lot know your stuff thats for sure!

what i wana know is how do you know who your talking to? is it just a free for all? say you were having a chat with your mate in the car infront of you would anyone else pick up that signal? could other people get involved in your conversation?

desprately want one like the idea of talking to all those truckers! hehe just dont know what im doing with one thats all!

many thanks if you could answer some of my questions lol

[koss]

So for a mini, say on the london to brighton run where you could be 10miles apart. what would work
1) would anything work thats legal
2)what would work thats not legal

how did you get caught koss? Was it fixed or in a car?

A mobile phone would work

A legal cb radio in a town you might get 5 miles, in a open area with line of sight maybe 10 miles. all depends on the ionosphere.

6.6 mhz was the old tv channels and when they stopped using it, we decidid to use it as you get a lot more range with less power on low freq. I was sitting in the shed (my radio shack) one day talking to some one in iceland when a man with earphones on opend the shed door. He was from the home office he had been monitoring me for days. Tracked me down using direction and signal tracking gear. He unplugged my rig about £500 worth put it in his old yellow bedford van and drove off :'( .

Phil yes cb is a free for all, a bit like an open forum but you can get speech scramblers for you and your mates to stop people earwigging.

You can also hire pmr radios like what the st johns use. They have a good range on 430mhz iirc.

Remember tho you can get done the same as using your mobile behind the wheel

[E.L.M.O]

thats a god point i didnt think about that. is it possible to get handsfree CB for the car?

I bet it was a bit of a shock when the guy opened the door!

[overboost]

I used to have a cb radio in my bedroom with a magmount ariel that got upgraded to a full on atenna bolted to the side of the house... Used to speak to loads of people, that got very good signal pick up but being stationary and on a mast it was very good. I was licensed to use it as well, so it was legal. (although for the first year it wasnt because I wasnt aware you needed a licence).

Never had a car one though, dont see the point in todays world with mobile phones and walkie talkies etc...

[E.L.M.O]

walkie talkies have a C**p range and mobile phone cost a bomb and take to long to get a confrence call going. its easier to have a cb radio where everyone in the convoy can hear.

[koss]

thats a god point i didnt think about that. is it possible to get handsfree CB for the car?

I bet it was a bit of a shock when the guy opened the door!

You can get a throat mic voice activated
As far as the bust we all knew it was going to happen one day. The italians still pirate 6.6 to this day.

[E.L.M.O]

bet it was still a shock!

[koss]

It was a shock, but at the time you here of so many other people getting caught you think it will never happen to you.
Indoors they need a warrant but i got caught red handed.
I was only 16/17 years old at the time and it was a good hobby better than drinking or getting in bother. doing no harm

[E.L.M.O]

other than converscate the geat did anything else come of it?

[koss]

other than converscate the geat did anything else come of it?

No not in them days, they just took your gear unless you were caught again. I had great fun with it and learn'd a lot about radio including moon bounce and working with the ionosphere talking to people all over the world real good fun.

[E.L.M.O]

so wots moon bounce etc?

[koss]

Radio waves can bounce off anything metalic the ionosphere lies just above the atmosphere ionised particals in a gas reflect radiation same as the moon.

So the idea is to point a directional beam type antenna at the moon and bounce your signal back down to earth at say 30 degrees and maybe hit australia.

the ionosphere is more localized

This has been practised since the 1930s

Dont know if it would work with the london to brighton run tho

[Silicon Skum]

Radio waves can bounce off anything metalic the ionosphere lies just above the atmosphere ionised particals in a gas reflect radiation same as the moon.

So the idea is to point a directional beam type antenna at the moon and bounce your signal back down to earth at say 30 degrees and maybe hit australia.

the ionosphere is more localized

This has been practised since the 1930s

Dont know if it would work with the london to brighton run tho

Hehe, that brings back memories! Lets just say at the time I didn't have the required licences to it though.....

I also used to practice shooting skip with the CB, my trusty (now just rusty) binatone 5star rig, 50+ watt burner and Firestick twig. I had some great (if a bit weak and hissy) conversations with different countries during some particularly strong solar activity, a number of years ago. had the USA, Alaska, Italy and once Japan (I think..) but lack of a common language meant short conversation.

I guess some things never change though, right now I'm typing this on a laptop running off a car battery and AC inverter, connected via a directional antenna WIFI link, to my internet connection at my house, while I'm working on one of my empty properties a few streets away. heh! I was just going to listen to my MP3 collection, but figured I might as well use the shoutcast streams.

Ahwell, fag and tea break over, but at least I have streaming internet radio to keep me going for a few hours.

SS

[koss]

My old rig

 ft707.jpg   77.42K   1 downloads

used to love working the skip, i was in a club so we had a po box to send QSl cards to proove we had contact.
mainly brazil,italy,usa and one to wogga wogga in australia

[Silicon Skum]

used to love working the skip, i was in a club so we had a po box to send QSl cards to proove we had contact.
mainly brazil,italy,usa and one to wogga wogga in australia

Nice bit of kit that! My equiptment was just some old salvaged junk I got hold of, was a little buggerd, but managed to fix it up enough to work (when it felt like it), even though it had no proper case (was just the bare parts, so I cramed it into a biccy tin!). I managed to run up a long wire ant between my attic bedroom and a tree, wasn't realy tuned to any particular freq, but worked well enough. Ah well, I was only a kid at the time. lol

Still got my old Binatone CB rig though, just need to find the old style mic connector and a mic to get it going again (the mic gave it's life to an experiment with packet data from my computer serial port....TNC stylee! - didnt work though).

SS