Anyone Ever Have A Redneck CB Set Up For A Base?

[zzdiesel]

I did a couple of times in my younger poorer days.

We lived out in the country in a house trailer back in 1978 and I parked my car beside my bedroom window. I took the mobile out and took it inside. I think it was a 40 channel Johnson or some kind of a Pace. I ran two wires from the battery for power and ran the coax in from the trunk mount antenna. It got out pretty good like that. I was surprised.

Another time later than that in like 1984; we lived in some apartments where antennas were strictly against the rules. They had clothes lines out behind the buildings. They used steel wires on steel posts. I mounted a 102" steel whip on one of the posts. The clothes line wires served as the ground plane. I could slide the wires to adjust the SWR that I connected to the ground braid on the coax. I had the standing wave down to a 1.3 on that rig. I got away with that for a couple of months and then I got stupid. I put up a Big Stick on a 20 ft pole and mounted it beside the clothes line post. The manager showed up the next day and told me that I had 24 hrs to take it all down or I would get eviction papers. He wouldn't even let me use the the whip again. I guess that's what happens sometimes when you press your luck. We didn't stay there very long after that.

[lieut25]

I can remember when i first got into CB when I was like 11yo, I threw a cheap mobile antenna up on the roof of the house and it stuck to the bottom of a coffee can with a piece a wire attached from the can lid to a nail that was sticking in the ground. I guess you can call that a redneck ground system...lol

[zzdiesel]

You just reminded me of another thing I did and lucked out on. My Mom's BF gave us a 23 channel Teaberry "Mighty T" when I was about 13 or 14. I made friends with a guy who gave me a handheld Turner power mic. I cut the mic off of the stock mic cord and spliced the two cords together. I guessed the wiring and twisted the wires together and taped them with electrical tape. The darn thing actually worked. It worked too good. The neighbors started calling my Mom about my CB tearing their TV's new ones. Then I got pissed and sold the damn thing.Then I got into trouble for selling it, and I had to get it back.

[C138Kaysone]

Originally Posted by lieut25

I can remember when i first got into CB when I was like 11yo, I threw a cheap mobile antenna up on the roof of the house and it stuck to the bottom of a coffee can with a piece a wire attached from the can lid to a nail that was sticking in the ground. I guess you can call that a redneck ground system...lol

lol now thats the funniest thing i heard all day.

[odontia32m]

I knew a guy with an export radio, beam and 1000 watts, LOL.

[gewecke]

cut 11'3'' of piano wire or copper 22 or 31awg. wire and connect it to a non-conductive insulator. then connect another piece same length to the other side. 22'6" total length.
It's nearly invisible at 10' away,hence a stealth 11meter (cb) dipole as good as most ground planes.
OR...better yet. Just get your ham license,and talk greater distances with less power,smaller antennas!
N9ZAS.

[zzdiesel]

Originally Posted by odontia32m

I knew a guy with an export radio, beam and 1000 watts, LOL.

Hell, that's not a Redneck station. That's damn near a dream station.

[ki4rvh]

When I was about 14 I got a CB. I built several wire antennas that were pretty cruddy lookin but worked. I used whatever wire I could find and spliced until I had the right length. I remember an old bright red drop cord that worked good as a vertical dipole that I had run up in a tall pine tree. Pieces of cable TV coax the cable man gave me actually spliced with tape was used for a feed line. It was really amazing some of the junk we used to use that worked fairly well.

CB was clean back then and a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun experimenting and seeing how far we could get. I used to work a guy 70 miles away as the crow flies a lot late in the evening. All my friends had them as well. When we got our drivers license we used them in our cars as well.

Cell phones had just come out and no one we knew had one. One buddy of mine put an old telephone receiver on his and mounted a little push button on it for a PTT. He used to let girls talk to me on it and they thought he had a telephone in his truck and I had one in my car.

The FCC still made house calls back then too. A guy in town with an Elkin 4 tuber and a slider (VFO) attached to his radio had Uncle Charlie show up one day. They took it all and gave him a big fine.

My original CB sits on the top shelf in my shack. It works but isn't hooked up. Looking at it brings back a lot of fun memories. That was a lot more than was asked but anyway it was fun remembering.

[odontia32m]

Originally Posted by zzdiesel

Hell, that's not a Redneck station. That's damn near a dream station.

I am now a reformed ham operator. It was a hell of a station. I have a better amateur station now.

[n9emz]

In my case, there was no reason to reform as I've continuously operated both CB and HAM stations for going on 40 years. Same goes for 30 or more local CB/HAM operators within a 50 mile radius of my shack; a number of which I Elmered or otherwise influenced into the HAM ranks. Early in the morning and evening, we all meet on CB to keep each other up to speed on local area developments/news, and we frequently meet on HF nets with other friends from all over the country.

As far as the FCC is concerned, they're welcome to walk into my shack any time of day or night, with or without a warrant. I'll even brew up a fresh pot for them.

73.

[Highlander_821]

Back in the early nineties, I and a few friends did not have phones. We were all struggling to make ends meet, and one friend was a consumer electronics repair tech. He had a few old 23 channel CBs that customers had dropped off and never came back for, so he repaired them and gave us each one. My antenna was a 1/2 wave fiberglass stick, which my landlord wouldn't allow to be mounted outside. So I would put it in the bathtub with the top poking up into the attic access above the tub. It didn't fit straight up and down, it was at about a 20 degree angle, lol

For the other guys and girls, we made a handful of 1/4 wave groundplanes out of wire and standoff insulators on an 8 foot 2 by 2. They worked remarkably well. We all had a blast, and we could keep in touch with a system that required no monthly fees. It was pretty reliable, nobody was more than 3 or 4 miles apart.

Those were really fun times, despite the fact that we were consistently broke. It was a time when you needed your friends to get by. Now, we are all prosperous and doing quite well financially, but I sort of miss that time in a way. Weird, huh?

We all have ham tickets now.

[kb2vxa]

"One buddy of mine put an old telephone receiver on his and mounted a little push button on it for a PTT."

WAY ahead of you guy, I put a PTT handset and hang up cradle from an Army field telephone pack on my Hallicrafters CD-5A in my '59 Chevy with a 102" steel whip, what a chick magnet as if the car itself wasn't enough. Yup, before it all went to hell CB was all about experimenting within the law (the FCC had some real TEETH back then) and we came up with contraptions that would make Rednecks blush with envy. We had so much fun with so little hardware and a whole lot of imagination, it pains me even to think what CB has degenerated to.

"We all have ham tickets now."

Same here, CB was a great place to get your feet wet, a stepping stone to greater things. Funny, we didn't have to leave our "CB ways" behind, we never had them in the first place. Yup, we spoke English and took our communicating seriously, informal but serious and made the potty mouths and phony Texans feel most unwelcome. Now if he was a trucker up from Abilene we'd make him feel right at home, a little bit of Northern hospitality never hurt a bit. (;->)

[Highlander_821]

We had a fun group going for a while. While we studied and even after we got licensed, our operations on CB were very "ham-like". I think our area was blessed with a pretty good tradition of courteous, helpful people on the radio, so we weren't "turned off" by all the crap on CB that is the conventional wisdom these days, because we just didn't encounter that stuff much at all.

Besides having fun, we were actually getting useful service from using CBs to keep in touch with each other. And the fact that it was essentially free to get the system on the air and actually working was pretty cool.

We had an 11 meter AM net every Wednesday night, and sometimes had 25-30 checkins from several counties. It was really fun. Then myself and a couple of others who were sort of the glue that kept it together left town or got into other hobbies, and it kind of dried up.

[millrad]

Actually, I remember SSB CB from the 23-channel days. The sideband ops would hang around channel 16, and then later - as now - the upper 30s and channel 40. SSB operators were always courteous and ham-like. Plus the skip contacts were great, when the band opened up.
Pete Miller
W1AMJ