The Development of The First CB repeater (or Owed to an Elastic Band!) – A simple but effective repeater by an anonymous contributor!

Back in the mid eighties, known by CB’ers as “the good old days”. There was a lot of CB’ers in my local town. There was also a guy who lived on a farm on a hill high above the town. His outlook was brilliant and his CB contacts made us all wonder if he was talking to himself and just winding us up. Until you visited his house and realised what an advantage several hundred feet extra height gave you.

What do you get when Ship’s Captain drinks too much beer? A brilliant Rap on the CB!

Who are the Homebrew Crew I hear you ask? Many years ago (1992 in fact) on the CB Radio were quite a number of idiots who keyed the mic up for hours on end, usually on the calling channel and decided to try and jam everyone out, sometimes swearing, other times just leaving the mic down for 3 or 4 hours. It was mainly one guy that no one liked very much and he was called “Wilf” and went by the handle of “Ship’s Captain”.

Axel Jack looks back at the Fidelity 1000 CB Radio and it’s other various guises to remember how bad these radios really are…

Way back in the early days of CB, when it was legalised in 1981, there was many CBs that arrived very quickly on the market. Some were acceptably good, like Unidens, Rotels, Yorks, Midlands etc. Since the required specifications were fairly tight on the transmit side and very relaxed on receive, some sets were built as cheap as they thought they could get away with. Hence Amstrads, Binatone route 66 and a hundred other “bleed over boxes” were marketed which worked OK, but had terrible adjacent channel rejection.