Orion-Andy from Broad Town remembers.......

I remember helping Dougie from next door line the roof of his Reliant Robin with baking foil. Being fibreglass it didn't offer much of a ground plane. That would have been 1982 because it was around the time of my tenth birthday. He let me talk to one or two people after we tested his SWR and I was hooked.

We started out with a base-loaded whip on a biscuit tin, with a Harrier CB and I think a borrowed car battery in place of a PSU. Mum didn't want me to transmit until we'd heard some people talking. After a day or two of hearing nobody I decided to plug the microphone in, which seemed to improve things somewhat! ;-)

After running the biscuit tin in the loft for a while (assisted by more of the aforementioned baking foil) we upgraded to our first proper base antenna: a "Watt Pole" (base loaded quarter wave with a full length ground plane hanging below it). We got some surprisingly
good results with that. Then there were Thunderpoles and a few half- wave and 5/8-wave verticals.

Mostly we ran the Harrier CB. It was a robust little radio based on a fairly ordinary Cybernet chassis with the basics: volume, squelch and a 40-position rotary switch for the channel. An S-meter and a red LED channel display. I knew people with the Harrier CBX, which had
additional knobs for RF gain, mic gain and perhaps delta-tune (not sure how useful this is on an FM radio) and tone.

Being a boy who was very interested in electronics, the equipment fascinated me. I learned about superhets, mixers, PLL chips and antennas back then and it stuck. Years later I found myself in a job interview where I was asked to draw a block diagram of a radio receiver. The CB books I'd read made it easy to put the oscillators, mixers, filters and amplifiers in the right place, so I can credit CB with getting me that job. I've used the theory and experience in other jobs that involved radio and electronics too.

Equipment aside, what I remember best about CB in Britain is the people. Bill on the Hill ("Silver Comet"), Stan and May in Purton with their stationary engines, "Harbour Lights", "Orange Man" and Tim "Rasputin" who helped me out with homebrew electronics and making wire dipoles with Dave "Donkey Derby". I remember people having actual conversations on the air: civilised, interesting discourse! I remember how strange it was to finally meet someone at an eyeball in Tetbury or Broad Hinton and find that they looked nothing like I had pictured them. A few minutes of talking to them in person and the face somehow
fit the voice, so afterwards I could picture people whenever I heard them on the air, even if the handle didn't come to me immediately.

Years later and thousands of miles away, I was given a CB as a birthday present. I'm still fascinated by radio and I find myself glancing up at interesting antennas as I drive around, but CB here in the U.S. just isn't the same. There are technical differences, but what's really missing are the people. I still wonder what happened to the friends we used to talk to back then and I wish them all well, wherever they are.

- Andy.