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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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) 😉
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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. 🙂
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.
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
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
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 !!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 👍🏼
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?! 🇨🇦+🇬🇧=👍
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 :)
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!!!!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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....
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 !
Oh my god I had the same mag mount and antenna. Of course I did the biscuit tin thing and also on the radiator using the pipes as the ground plane 🤣🤣 I totally forgot til now that I had a DV27 too. Man this takes me back
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.
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
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 !
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.
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.
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!
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
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
Biscuits tin lid was upside down in the attic, my spring whip pointing around 2 o'clock, worked surprisingly well locally. My parents also had a wood burner with a big chimney with metal brackets, was just outside the window. To the brackets I had some simple D Bolts that held an upside down scaffolding bar & footplate, until my Mam saw it of course, then it had to come down, but back up just after Sunset lol
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..
Its always good to see people doing these kinds of experiments. Saint Albans to Stevenage is about 20 miles and that is very good range providing there was no lift on at the time? I'm in a very bad spot for radio I tried this in the attic with a antenna for 4 meters 70MHz and could not get more than a few miles.
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 used a DV27 and stick the magmount on the steel water tank in the loft... The tank rusted so now..... I use a similar setup only now I use a tri top load antenna and a stud mount... bolted to a piece of 90 degree angle Alu, screwed that to the wooden cross brace. My ground plane is 16x 3m pieces of stainless steel fence wire. I get out around 15 miles
I used a 5/8 wave mobile magmount for 2meters on a metal panel that was on the wall of my apartment over the A/C unit. Could hit just about any repeater with a 2 watt handheld.
Yeah I had a biscuit tin on my CB Aerial, can't remember what CB or aerial I had!! Never jhad an SWR meter, no wonder we could never get hardly anyone, never knew about the kitchen foil trick!!
used the tin on the floor but with copper wire on each corner on top of foil to create grounding, got it down to 1.1. first cb was viking but my fave was the com2000 amd cobra 19gtl, for dx.
There was only am radio then we had mag mount on oil drum in the loft they use to have a swap shop on a Sunday afternoon in Tamworth 😁 we had a pest called thie whisper who had a burner in his car that use to ruin the swap shop queuing over us all the time we also had a guy called organgrinder that use to buy and sell radio's from his home good old days
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)
Quality I used to have a comtron used to whack out 9 watts
I’ve talked off a magnet mount on a 12” iron skillet. We had a cabin on top of the mountain with a car battery and mobile. Talked everywhere
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 Luke. You dont need to spend a lot of money to make CB work.
I remember when CB radios only had 13 channels and before that you had to buy the crystals both transmit and receive for each channel you wanted.
Ive seen those rigs on ebay. Really interesting
Back in the late 70's/early 80's, you tended to talk to people in the same street as yourself, so having a big aerial wasn't a big deal.
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.
Oh yeah i forgot about the dustbin lids. Grab your dad black and decker drill and you were away.
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
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.
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
A friend of mine had a mag mount on a tin with loads of radials connected and back in the 80s he worked the world on ssb !
Yes radials worked. We tried wire back then.
For a while I had a cb in my kitchen with the mag mount on the top of the refrigerator.
Not the best plan.
Fridges are notoriously, electrically noisey
Works like a champ. Thanks for sharing!
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.
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.
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) 😉
Those last two words is why I quit.
Back on now, hopefully a li'l wiser ;-)
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
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!
What a blast from the past Fred. Fantastic video. Gave me a big smile. Thank you
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.
All that callsign, q code, pseudo ham speak is putting me off getting set up again.
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.
Me & my mate had an eyeball with two birds in Eldon square but when we turned up & seen them we ran away.1982 a think. Think the rig was Amstrad.
Hahahaha how many of us done that lol
ha ha we Did the same right ugly sods. They sounded nice .We thart we was gowin to get a bit
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.
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.
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
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. 🙂
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.
I missed out on the AM days being at school and with pocket money :-( Having a AM radio was very exciting back then with all the hiding from Busby.
Of course. My handle was Tin Lid. I also had a car battery in a wardrobe that eventually rotted all my jeans rofl
My childhood handle was "Pig Pen". Mother gave it to me because she never had to get on me about keeping my bedroom clean!
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
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
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 !!
Great to hear!
Oh my you brought back some good and funny memories!!!! Made my mind up to get back on the air after 15 years away 👍👍
Thats the spirit. There are people around and SSB is getting slowly more popular.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I was on the cb radio at the age of14and I am 57now and still on it
Let me guess, you’re missing several teeth and live in squalor.
🎯
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
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 👍🏼
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.
Thanks Norman. 73s mate.
@@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?! 🇨🇦+🇬🇧=👍
I started on CB radio 1975 I am still on it today.
I started radio in 1976 and I am still into although here in Central Florida I hardly hear anybody on there
" for the craic" lol. Great video .im just starting off with a hand held cb. Thanks for this video im gonna try it. Greetings from Ireland
Good luck!
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 :)
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!!!!
when i got back into Cb it was a while before i had a outside antenna so used metal bin lid and mag mount it worked and was ok for temp setup.
In America we have cookie "biscuit" tins that are sold around Christmas time
Yep same here. Amazing but out shopping today and the shops full of them
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
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
Yeah I used to run my rig like this when I lived in a flat and I couldn't put up a proper antenna, also made an inverted V which worked well.
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.
WOW Im just looking back at this was 4 years
Brings back memories of back in the late 70's had a Tandy TRC 24c , we used to make dipole antennas with VB 2 9ft lengths of coated wire VB great fun
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.
Thanks for this video I have a mag mount but didn’t know how to use it without a car roof! Awesome!
Same! Thanks!
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.
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
We used this setup with a DV27 back in the early AM illegal days. Worked amazingly well..
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!
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.
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
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.
Use a cb all the time for work. It's great no one uses it but 4 of us . No chatter
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....
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 !
Mag-mount on the top of my refrigerator, 2m skip to Cuba from Mississippi
very cool,i used to stick my k-40 magmount onto my metal barn siding and it worked great for dx in the 1990s
The good old days 😂😂😂❤❤
I tried something very similar to this and it works very well! Thanks so much for the advice.
Yes. In 1980'ish, A President with SSB, Biscuit Tin Lid and copper wire to form larger Ground Plane. Had copies from GY, Norfolk to NY State!
Oh my god I had the same mag mount and antenna. Of course I did the biscuit tin thing and also on the radiator using the pipes as the ground plane 🤣🤣
I totally forgot til now that I had a DV27 too. Man this takes me back
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.
Thanks for sharing!
Used to have a dv27 mounted to a car wheel in the corner of my bedroom , using a Murphy home base amongst others , rotel 240 , amstrad etc
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
I stumbled across here by accident, now I’m a subscriber . Interesting !
Cheers
Never did the biscuit tin thing - (1983) Stuck mine on the radiator - Next it was a Watt Pole in the loft. Magmount on the radiator got out further !
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 !
Great, that is how we all begun!
No its not..
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.
2 meter 1960s Heathkit used a pizza pan and magnet mount worked great! 🤣
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.
Wire dipoles suspended across your back garden worked great - both performance and swr.
Notice how prices have plummeted since the 70s. Bearing in mind that the 1970s dollar was worth about five times more!
Aint that the truth.
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!
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
So many memories... I used to go around the houses with my patition asking fold to sign it trying to get it all legal ! Feels like 5 mins ago
I rem the AM boys being so upset when they only made FM legal.
eeek my spelling mistakes ! I need smaller fingers !!!!
@@dafyddr8678Four years later... your spelling mistakes are hereby forgiven! 😄
A magnet mount antenna on a metal German army helmet would be funny.
Very cool video Fred😂 I was doing this at one point 😂 but hey, it was good enough for locals
My setup back in 1985 was a 40ch pacer mustang with a DV27 on a biscuit Tin 😍😍😍
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
It works !!! On my balcony with aluminium parler and a magnum antenna !!! So smart !!
Way to go !
Biscuits tin lid was upside down in the attic, my spring whip pointing around 2 o'clock, worked surprisingly well locally.
My parents also had a wood burner with a big chimney with metal brackets, was just outside the window.
To the brackets I had some simple D Bolts that held an upside down scaffolding bar & footplate, until my Mam saw it of course, then it had to come down, but back up just after Sunset lol
Not a magmount but a DV27 bolted to a biscuit tin and also used an old car wheel. That was in 1974. Long before it was popular in the UK
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..
Sounds like you had a hoot back then.
Its always good to see people doing these kinds of experiments. Saint Albans to Stevenage is about 20 miles and that is very good range providing there was no lift on at the time? I'm in a very bad spot for radio I tried this in the attic with a antenna for 4 meters 70MHz and could not get more than a few miles.
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 used a DV27 and stick the magmount on the steel water tank in the loft...
The tank rusted so now.....
I use a similar setup only now I use a tri top load antenna and a stud mount... bolted to a piece of 90 degree angle Alu, screwed that to the wooden cross brace.
My ground plane is 16x 3m pieces of stainless steel fence wire.
I get out around 15 miles
I used a 5/8 wave mobile magmount for 2meters on a metal panel that was on the wall of my apartment over the A/C unit. Could hit just about any repeater with a 2 watt handheld.
Bloody hell my first antenna was a dv27 on a small tripod on tin foile in the corner of me bedroom lol. It worked as well haha
Yeah I had a biscuit tin on my CB Aerial, can't remember what CB or aerial I had!! Never jhad an SWR meter, no wonder we could never get hardly anyone, never knew about the kitchen foil trick!!
used the tin on the floor but with copper wire on each corner on top of foil to create grounding, got it down to 1.1. first cb was viking but my fave was the com2000 amd cobra 19gtl, for dx.
AM CB, DV27, biscuit tin & tin foil. Damn I can remember doing that!
Worked really well. :-)
Still works today
There was only am radio then we had mag mount on oil drum in the loft they use to have a swap shop on a Sunday afternoon in Tamworth 😁 we had a pest called thie whisper who had a burner in his car that use to ruin the swap shop queuing over us all the time we also had a guy called organgrinder that use to buy and sell radio's from his home good old days
HOW DO FRED TOOK ME BACK FELLA AM 52 NOW REMEMBER THOSE DAYS
Same age here mate :-)