CB radio's

[Wedg1e]

DV27 rings a bell, IIRC next best thing to a K40 for bragging at the bar. This is stirring up memories, some best forgotten too!

Oh god aye, memories of the DV27... my mate Paul Whitley from Keighley (last heard of running a hotel in the Midlands) had a manky brown (harvest gold? ) Vauxhall Viva and someone had nicked his DV overnight. I had one on a cruciform alloy tube groundplane up in the loft (still at home with the folks then) so as it was really important to drive up onto the Moors (Carlton Bank, Brightspark will know it ) and spend the night huddled in the car shouting CQDX and winding up the muppets in Middlesbrough, I volunteered to climb up and get the DV down. My parents' house has quite high ceilings so the usual means of access involved a stepladder from the garage, however we were in a hurry so Paul offered to give me a leg up. To get back down I stood on his shoulders but my shoe dug into his neck and when he twisted away from the pain I fell out of the loft and landed feet-first on the old dear's Electrolux cylinder vac that she'd left parked in its usual spot on the landing. I swear my right foot twisted 90 degrees sideways; the pain was horrendous but I made it to the car and off we went.
By the time he dropped me off home at about 0500 my calf and ankle looked like I'd borrowed it from the Elephant Man. I got the shoe off and all this fluid in my leg drained down into my foot. By the time I got up at lunchtime it was every colour of the rainbow. The bloody vacuum cleaner didn't have a mark on it...
There was a codicil to this story: when he got up to go to work the next afternoon someone had nicked MY bloody DV off his car...

 

[Wedg1e]

Right, confession time...
You know those idiots who used to 'mike key' or play music on Channel 19? Well, a mate of mine at the time called Jeff was a proper mischievious git who never slept; it was like having a hyper-active 3-year-old in the house. Anyway one night he suggested we take a CB rig out on the bike (I'd not long passed my bike test and had a Suzi 400) and see what amusement was to be had. So I lashed up a length of wire soldered into a PL259 which he shoved down his trouser leg, connected the rig to the bike battery and off we went with the rig inside his coat. We found that we could get into the pedestrianised areas of local estates and he'd give whoever was around a bit of grief. Eventually we'd get a bite and people would jump into cars and start looking for us, which led to a couple of near-misses (most people would be looking for a group of lads in a car; one time a car full of proper thugs flagged us down and asked if we'd seen any such cars - Jeff had to keep the mike keyed in his pocket so the rig speaker wouldn't give us away).
I got my thinking head on and built a decade counter circuit that simulated the channel programming inputs to the PLL... except that it would slowly add one to the count, making the rig continually step through the channels while keyed up (this dididn't work on all rigs as sometimes the PLL couldn't achieve lock so would drop the transmitter out). Now, in a former job I'd worked on domestic alarm systems so I had a couple of spare high-capacity 12V lead-acid batteries. So we'd place the rig and a battery in an ASDA bag, ride around till someone was gobbing off and plant the set in a dark back alley near them, with a length of wire trailing along the floor as an aerial. Switch on, jump on bike, go home and listen to the ruckus
"Oo's f***ing keying up on us? It must be Jonno. Nah, he's blowing my windows out, it's Wozza [sorry Woz, first name that came to mind]..."
After a few hours the battery would die so we'd nip back, scoop up the ASDA bag and go - and of course nobody suspected us as we would be taking part in the on-air 'manhunt'!
The next step was to add a 555 timer IC configured as the classic American police siren; with this piped into the rig's audio input, and another 555 set up to generate a reset pulse to the decade counter the rig would be randomly keying-up all over the band, with a distorted 'woo-woo-woo' that was guaranteed to bleed over several adjacent channels for any poor bu993r near it.
If only I'd done something useful in my youth

 

[Robotstar5]

I did try fitting a rig to my bike but never managed to get the TX/RX switching reliable

 

[octo0072000]

That superstar would look lovely in my shed on an Antron 99

have you seen the prices of old am rigs now cobra 148 up to £200

 

[the snooper]

have you seen the prices of old am rigs now cobra 148 up to £200

I've also been looking and all the decent rigs are going for good money

 

[octo0072000]

I seem to remember some of the President AM rigs were works of art/furniture size?

here is one for you cobra home base set

 

[the snooper]

here is one for you cobra home base set

I saw that one and another rack mount type home base with plenty on it, more then a cobra has

 

[Woody.v8]

I saw that one and another rack mount type home base with plenty on it, more then a cobra has

http://www.radioworld.co.uk/cb_radi...5dx_am-fm-ssb-cw_10_12_mtr_base_station_radio

 

[the snooper]

Very similar the one I saw was on ebay

 

[MrFluffy]

superstar 2000 super low to super high

And deaf as a post at either end of its range :-)

It was a easy mod on the superstar/cobra 360 (same innards) going from memory, the frequency was selected by a pll which took digital input from the channel knob to select 1-40, only the two most significant bits of the PLL was vacant, so you could add in switchs (channel 9 switch eg) to feed the pin with the 5v from memory to select that pin, then it added 1 to the input and selected a higher range of channels, tune the rig to be down low with no pll inputs then use the two added switches to generate the extra higher channels. You could take output to near 27w but the final transistor stage got really hot and the output got dirty after about 18-20w, so best to tune it to put 4w out and feed that into a massive valve linear and have a cleaner signal.
I used to be fairly active on 27.555 ssb on mine many many years ago before becoming a G7 ham and I used to do all my own rig stuff. I still have my superstar fm from that period with the switch mods etc somewhere along with a little 200w solid state zetagi linear and yes, its still hard of hearing at either end of its range because of limitations on the rf filter stage tuning. At the time I had qso cards from pretty much all over the world and without a directional antenna, it wasn't that hard to do when the skip was right. At one point I was using a discone that tuned in on the whole of the band and all of the vhf and uhf amateur bands, just to take the rip out of all the people going on about a dv27 or silver rod being the ultimate

The desktop furniture presidents were much less capable inside, they only had two bands in them as standard, and the design of the boards didn't lend itself to tweaking much and the psu got a bit upset with higher power operation and used to overheat. Impressive to look at though.
I tinkered with a lot of radio stuff back then, did the rtty thing with lissajous figures on a scope for tuning, sstv, amateur tv with the repeaters etc, and a lot of packet radio and tcp over radio with homebuilt baycom, homemade rtty decoder, a pk87 tnc etc. Now I just use the tinternet and get further.
Now I live somewhere i could probably rig up a full wave long wire on 160m , but not really that interested in recreating my youth, lots of new electronics and fpga's etc to play with instead, less knobheads keying over 19 or a amateur repeaters input frequency that way :-)

 

[Wedg1e]

You often had to fanny about switching in extra capacitance to retune the VCO once you tried swinging a long way from the standard channels.
Not sure who would claim a DV27 (cost about £3 in 1981) or a Silver Rod to be the ultimate anything except 'ultimate bog standard'. IIRC the K40 was the most-w**ked over car aerial (undeservedly) and Audiolines were suppposed to suffer from less bleedover than others ... which was horse-cack as the main determining factor in that aspect was the 10.695Mhz ceramic IF filter, exactly the same in the Audiolines in as practically every other rig. I used to make a few bob fitting crystal IF filters instead but 10Khz spacing, cheap circuit design, echo mikes and so on in every other house on a council estate was only going to end badly.
For a while on the legal 40 I used a Communicators NI-440DX which was unusual in having relay switching of the aerial (rather than the diode blocking method of most sets); used to make a fantastic wideband chirp as the contacts closed when you keyed the mike, audible through all forty channels right across town
My G1E** callsign expired about 1987 and I haven't bothered with it or CB since. By then 2m was full of ex-CBers talking the same sh!te they did on CB only with a much more expensive radio.
I flogged all my gear to buy some half-decent hifi stuff (most of which I still own) and a few years back a mate emailed to say he'd been visiting an old guy he knew who 'listened' on a kit-based 2m transceiver that mate recognised as one I'd built in 1984, it was still going strong I suspect the old guy is no longer around, the family probably thought the radio gear was some old junk and skipped it...

 

[Woody.v8]

Audiolines were uniden boarded wasn't they? People always said they was better RX but i always found them deaf albeit less noisy than a cybernet boarded rig?

 

[Wedg1e]

Audiolines were uniden boarded wasn't they? People always said they was better RX but i always found them deaf albeit less noisy than a cybernet boarded rig?

That rings a bell. Probably any resistance to bleedover was tied to them being less sensitive in the first place It used to make me laugh when people swore their Rotel was better than a Harrier... they were built on the same PCB (as well as a few others...). IIRC the Rotels were the best looking of the type.
One of the guys I worked with had the first rig I ever used fitted in his MG midget; it was a Yank 40 AM set made (I think) by Sharp and it had the channel display on the mike so the rig could be completely hidden (not much space to hide anything in a Midget!).

 

[Woody.v8]

I know what you mean

 

[Kayos]

Bit of a thread revival
I also can't believe it's been almost a year! But life etc........

Anyway I'm buying one for Christmas and still have the same problem of no space and if it's visible it needs to look factory, I couldn't cope with the "CB screwed to the dash look" when I spotted the Cobra 75

All the controls are on the mic, and the box can live hidden away

Unless I can find one to fit in the space to the right hand side of the steering wheel it looks like I found the one, and in less than a year!

 

[brightspark]

they were great in there time I had a 600 channel ham and a 200 watt burner used to dx and get qsl cards from all over world. a good bunch of lads on now its 19 channels of muppets on fm and not worth the bother.hardly anyone on

 

[Kayos]

As I said at the beginning, this is for off roading so depending on who goes and what happens, it could well just be muppets

 

[Robotstar5]

Is it going to look like this?

 

[Kayos]

Is it going to look like this?

View attachment 97606

Oh dear god no!

Someone is making me a fibreglass pod for the middle so I can fit 4 chunky switches for extra lights, this means my gauges will have to go on the A pillar, the CB will probably be under the drivers seat as the mic does everything so it can sit on the centre console

But if I didn't have heated seats I'd fit a normal CB where the cig lighter is

 

[Robotstar5]

Someone is making me a fibreglass pod for the middle so I can fit 4 chunky switches for extra lights, this means my gauges will have to go on the A pillar, the CB will probably be under the drivers seat as the mic does everything so it can sit on the centre console

I had the factory fit CD autochanger under the drivers seat on mine.