CB Uk before and after being made legal

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CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Bragi Mk2 »

I have just got back into my old hobby scanning and sw and on coming back to this group again after quite a long time i see a lot of changes in this great hobby .
I am sure there are some old breakers in here who have like me many a tale to say about the good old days of cb when the bears and busby where on our tail and having a cb fitted in you car van ect meant you could have both confiscated oh the fun days yups it was illegal but all we wanted was what most of the world had.
in early days we policed our illegal cb bands and we all enjoyed meeting up at local clubs and eyeballing our new cb friends and helping out our fellow buddys when we could we fought to get what we wanted cb in this country sadly near the end of illegal cb came the muppets then of course the year it was made legal I think every dam kid and muppet got a cb soon was impossible to use what we fought for due to government Fm only crap our uk bands being different and of course no ssb or am now i see we have been given this and on the old am band plan omg it sure took a long time to get this least i have managed to live long enough to see it happen.
I look forward to getting my old rig out and testing the waters up here in Scotland i used to be registered with CC breakers my handle was Roustabout
Ok lol that me done a introduction to this thread so lets hear some of your comments on CB past and CB future I bet many have some great story's to tell and I bet some crazy eyeballs

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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Farty »

Alas, it's dead on its knees here. Apart from foreign truckers on the motorway and wendy in MK playing music on the one nine its deserted.

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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by albrecht »

Yeah same in Boston, hardly anyone on . . .
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Bragi Mk2 »

Oh dear I wonder what is worse channels full of muppets or ones full of static
I not had a chance yet to get my old fm 40 channel rig out yet but i have tried monitoring the old and new channels on my scanner did seem kinda empty up here to
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by NUBSTER »

It's just as dead in London, apart from the pre arranged nets which to me if you have to pre arrange them it's pointless, I thought the idea of CB was call out to see who's about like in old days not pre arrange on a forum to talk to someone, there ain't even any Muppets on the 19 either now.
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Beefeater »

Hi,very quiet around hear (M1 Junc 18) boxed my rig up and might sell it sometime soon. Anybody on this forum who was in the Rushden and Wymington breakers club who used to meet in the Windmill Club Rushden back in the mid 70s. Good times were had by most and Am/SSB was always busy. Meetings well supported and charity funding successful.I packed up cb when it became legal and bought another rig when i retired in 2010.I have always had the same handle (Beefeater)
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by bragi »

I got my old log in back so will now post as bragi
I am surprised that even in london there are empty channels ,i do agree that to have to prearrange meetings online for what would be a day is pointless
its to be hoped that some more join this thread and perhaps here we can get in contact with old cb buddies or even new ones ,it was a hard fought thing to get CB into this country would be nice if it made a come back ok perhaps without to many muffets lol
i look forward to hearing more from all you old and new cbs out there
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Transwarp »

I could type for hours posting stories of the 'good old days' of CB but I won't bother. It was good for it's time as the world was a different place then. When it became legal in the UK in 1981 it was more fun for me (I was a young teen then) as lots more local folk jumped on. After it's peak it begin to grow old and what is left today is the shadow of what once was. Although I will always have some interest in radio, today I prefer the internet and a smartphone tbh.
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by The Collector »

Can't say much about the pre-legal days as I only borrowed an AM radio for a week or two before it became legal and I got a Fidelity Homebase on the first day of legality as an early Xmas pressie.

UKFM CB probably filled up 15 years of my life, with making new friends, meeting future girlfriends (and wife) and finding out generally how idiotic human beings can be at times too. Great times for the most, never to be forgotten (unless dementia sets in!), but sadly never to be repeated either.

The advent of the Personal Computer bringing the internet with it and things like Faceparty and Facebook etc. and then mobile phones becoming commonplace with "free" minutes and texts, all helped in CB Radio's demise.

Unless there's a Hollywood blockbuster with a heavy CB theme in it, those days are sadly never to be repeated.
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by bragi »

With the comments so far Cb did play a good part in peoples lives and for now it seems its a shadow of its former self with internet and of course face book mobile phones computers i for one am into computers have been many years as for mobile phones well they are more like mobile computers and i still find it amazing that I can drive down a road in uk while talking to my gf in america while she to drives that would be almost impossible to do with a cb so did video kill the radio makes me think about the record player and vinyl did tapes kill records then cds kill both I remember how records just seem to disappear from shelf's within a few months now back in favour,what i found in my long life is most things go in a circle so CB in some form may make a comeback ,when you look at ebay and sales of them makes one wonder what hell are they being used for lol door stops
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Transwarp »

Just my opinions on...... Things coming back into fashion are just money making instances, and to a certain extent, an urge to own what others had or have. Laying out £200 and upwards via a certain auction site for a 35 year old small metal box of caps, chips, and transistor's that in it's time most likely had more screwdrivers and soldering irons inside it then it spent on the air is not my thing. I can be nostalgic far more cheaper by just looking at pictures of them. Fact is if still wanting to use CB today got far more operating space legally now then back then for one thing, however most modern vehicles today just don't look good with a 7ft fire stick or a modulator mounted on them like a Ford Cortina, Granada, or Escort did! The past is the past, CB had it's moment in time as we did with it. The thrill of being naughty being on AM before we got or legal FM made it special for want of a better word, legal FM was the social media of it's day if you like. I was operating on AM about 12 months before we got legal FM and I was one of a few in the area I lived that was on legal FM with a type approved set one minute after midnight the day it was legal. I was part of that small bit of history, but as said it's in the past. Today I have no need or urges to own lots of material things. I had a large VHS tape collection, got rid for DVD's then started changing them for Blu-Ray's. I had a large tape & vinyl collection, guess what? Got rid and bought CD's and most of the DVD's/CD's I've also got rid of now. Today we have streaming and online gaming services so you can watch, listen, and play anything you want to. I can video call my children and other family members while making a brew and pausing a movie at will, this is the way of things today, it's great, but I still believe the internet is the devils creation and Ai will be our downfall...
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Tim Tom »

Yeah round here it's mainly people dxing or farmers and off roaders by sounds of it. Every now and again I hear some lorry drivers down the m5 but that's about it
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by The Collector »

Whereabouts in Somerset are you Tim Tom?

I'm in North Somerset myself.
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by paulears »

Like all things slightly dodgy, there is a real community, who have all taken some financial and legal risk to do what they do. Once it's too easy to get into, the quality drops. Happened in Ham radio, Pirate music radio, and all those kinds of things. Open the access, lower the standards. Ham radio in the US does seem to be very, very simple to get into, so husbands and wives take a test, buy a radio and just use it to talk to each other - never anyone who is a stranger. The urban explorer people apparently are suffering too. For years they had a tiny community, shared places to explore and kept it quiet. Now it's on facebook or youtube straight away, their sites are getting secured or shut up, and they're getting blamed for the destruction some people cause. We even get it with digital radio. People letting the secrets out to anyone, the users hearing about it and changing their systems. Just a modern thing. Hobbies getting diluted then mangled by people joining with different standards.

I've been away from home for nearly 3 months and one of the guys here is into surplus military comms. Let's just say there's a community of people using abandoned radio systems that are still functional. The kit was sold on a Government surplus site, and while in most parts of the country would do nothing, here it all works. From what I've found out, they all use military type callsigns and jargon. Been working for about a year and nobody new can get into it as the surplus equipment stock has gone, and a brand new radio would be mega money if you could buy one, and I don't think anyone has worked out how to programme them as not really something that appears on the net. I've heard it, but none of my own radio equipment can receive it.
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Re: CB Uk before and after being made legal

Post by Tim Tom »

The Collector wrote: 05 Jan 2019, 13:33 Whereabouts in Somerset are you Tim Tom?

I'm in North Somerset myself.
Without being too specific, between Bridgwater, Taunton and yeovil, sort of central haha
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