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Discussion » Questions » Communication » Have you ever owned a CB radio?

Have you ever owned a CB radio?

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Posted - November 5, 2017

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  • 3719
    No. Though I have used dedicated, short-range, two-way radios at work and elsewhere.

    CB was briefly fashionable among British children and teenagers after the film Convoy did the rounds accompanied by its acutely embarrassing theme-song hitting the charts, and professional drivers may have used (still use?) it genuinely, but it didn't really catch on.

    Even two or three of my work-mates - middle-aged men at that - played with CB for a time, and they would discuss its performance, using a 1/2"-mile Ordnance Survey map they posted on the workroom wall. They had even used compasses to draw range arcs on the map, centred roughly on the works' location. 

    I think you need a licence for them in Britain - I may be wrong, it's not something I've investigated, but radio-transmitters are quite tightly controlled to prevent interference with bona-fide radio equipment and operators. Even the ultra-low-frequency "radios" - I think they are really induction-loop devices - used by cave-rescue organisations for communicating between surface and underground, need a special licence.

    Eventually the portable (absurdly called "mobile") telephone put paid to private CB in this country, although of course those are purely one-to-one, not broadcast. Fleet lorry drivers might have radio sets on private company networks, rather as taxi-drivers do, but I don't know if this so. 

    I was intrigued by an article in a British custom-car magazine at the time of Convoy, by an American journalist invited to put his views from the American's perspective on the subject. I remember that he urged British CB enthusiasts not to adopt American lorry-drivers' CB slang because it would sound silly and pretentious outside of its native country and purposes.
      November 11, 2017 1:59 PM MST
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