CB Channel 6

I'm picking up what I think is a transmission from Texas, or somewhere in the Southern states judging by the accents. I'm using a Uniden Bearcat 680 which I just bought yesterday. It's set on DX, is this possible to receive this all the way up here in Ontario Canada?

yes, I'm hear it as well in the GTA. A little research shows it's a bunch of guys with highly overpowered radios down south. With the skip you'll hear them come and go


edit:

here's some more info

http://forums.radioreference.com/cb-radio-forum/214183-big-power-channel-6-a.html

Is this your first CB experience?

It's been like this for years and years. The big boys come and go with the wind. I've talked to a couple of them, and a couple of times to the Dominican Republic from here in NY back in the day, when I had my big CB base setup.

I'm not sure what really goes on with them but it appears it's purely a "showboat" of sorts. They don't really carry on any conversation, just shout-outs, if you will.

They don't refer to Ch.6 as the "Superbowl" for nothing!!!

It's nice to hear some traffic, lets me know my rig works! Would be nice to hear, and talk to local folk though, in Owen Sound, ON!

Thanks for your info folks, the CB traffic there must be a overpowered by that, heard it on 6 and 11 from here, it must be blocked down there.

It is called "skip". We are in the middle of a solar cycle when during the day local converations will be limited to about 1 km because of the skip allowing signals to bounce of the stratosphere and back to earth. In some cases it will bounce off earth and then off statosphere again. Do a search for CB skip and you will see what happens. When this solar cycle ends in the next couple of years, skip will be dead most of the time and local conversations will increase to about 20 kms. Solar cycles peak every 10-12 years. For more info. check this Thread http://forums.radioreference.com/skip-tropospheric-ducting-forum/

Back in the 70s my volunteer fire department was on 33 MHz. FM and we could talk from SW Ohio to deputies in AZ, mobile to mobile like they were in the same county. We received California fire traffic many times as well.

DavieCanada - My experinece although somewhat dated was that in Owen Sound I never heard a lot of CB traffic.....
I have no idea what the scene is like in the GTA anymore and am interested if anyone can comment. ( sorry, no hi-jack of thread intended )

There is also a local ham group that offers courses etc.... GBARC ( Georgian Bay amateur radio club) if you are interested in other avenues of the radio hobby.

I can hear those guys in Denver Colorado as Well. Pretty entertaining!!!

They all run 1 kw or more. No one stops them including the FCC, they do not touch them.
DOCTOR/795

And it's interesting because you would think the FCC would go after them. They go after all the CB shops trying to stop the sale of 10 meter export radios.

The way some of them babble on channel 6 is quite comical, yet at the same time has me wondering if they done fried their last brain cell with all that excessive RF they have exposed themselves to.

It was probably a bigger issue when they were splattering into the military / public safety bands in 30Mhz.

I don't know if they use those bands anymore unless it's agencies that simply have not upgraded.

DavieCanada said:

I'm picking up what I think is a transmission from Texas, or somewhere in the Southern states judging by the accents. I'm using a Uniden Bearcat 680 which I just bought yesterday. It's set on DX, is this possible to receive this all the way up here in Ontario Canada?

Click to expand...

Yes I remember a few years ago WITH MY NEEDLE PINNED,someone heard me out there in the skip!!! (2 times actually) and im only running stock wattage!!!! (Well I was..... My antenna whip was broken off during a wind event a couple years ago )


That is amazing in itself!!

When we are running our deer dogs in the Talladega National Forest on top of the highest mountain Cheaha in the state of Alabama the big boys from ch.6 will bleed over on us sometimes nearly 40 channels. We use CB's to communicate. It gets tough at times. A lot of us use our private HT's but not everyone wants to purchase one. SO while we are chasing gps signals and communicating they are listening to BLEED OVER!!!

I use to " hoot & holler '' with them folks when I had the ability to. I have moved on to greener pastures.

While not a CB fan, I do program the band into all of my scanners as a test and to test antennas. Even though in am in So. Calif., I pick up a lot of a CBer with the handle of "switchblade", claiming to be in Louisianna and running 14,000 watts. No idea if it's true. But it is true that I wish I could afford to even pay the power bill for 14KW.

I was tuning through the CB band the other day with my new Flex 1500 SDR that can see about 50KHz of spectrum on its scope. As I tuned down from 10m the noise floor got bigger and bigger with an undulating pattern and it finally peaked, you guessed it, on channel 6.

I had to switch to another radio that has a spectrum scope that will display 200KHz of spectrum to see exactly what was happening. There was a three or four way conversation, all skip and one guy was taking up a about 1MHz of spectrum every time he keyed up and another guy about half that at 500KHz. The complete 40 channel CB band is 440KHz wide.

There was obviously a lot of power being tossed around with signals in the +10 to +20dB over S9, but these guys are wasting a good amount of power with out of band IMD signals that do nothing but wipe out the entire spectrum. Judging by the spectrum and minimal roll off outside a 10KHz channel BW, I would say half their power is being flushed down the toilet and not being heard on the channel they have selected to carry on their in depth and intellectual conversation, not to mention a little postulating and preaching on the side.

I'm all for a place for these guys to hang out and play, but putting a really big POS class C amplifier on the air that is completely overdriven to the point of producing IMD that is -3dBc at best and the radio is being modulated by square waves because it can't produce enough audio to keep up with its RF output is a technical failure and not something to be proud of.

I'm a fan of "go big or go home" but also "do it right or don't bother" and some of these guys should figure out how to do things right or find another hobby because their wiping out the entire CB band and taking away from other peoples hobby.
prcguy

LoyalServant said:

It was probably a bigger issue when they were splattering into the military / public safety bands in 30Mhz.

I don't know if they use those bands anymore unless it's agencies that simply have not upgraded.

Click to expand...

I had a guy about a mile and a half from me that had a linear the size of a chest freezer. It was on rollers and he talked all over the world. His audio was very clean, but being so close, he ripped me up good on adjacent channels and on other ones, I could hear him clearly in the background of anything I listened to. I got along ok with him until he began to complain about me splashing HIM. I had like 150 watts and he had 10,000 (The corona he had on his Moonraker when he keyed up at full power was really neat), and he was crying all the time when I slightly (He made a tape) splashed him. He even complained about it sometimes when I was barefoot, and it annoyed the hell out of me. He wouldn't back his power down to under 1K, so it eventually got to the point I would talk skip just to annoy him. About the time it got "serious", I sold my CB stuff and moved out west. I wasn't surprised to hear him when I came back 7 years later. No big power at that point, and we got along fine until he developed dementia and went to the home.

I use to drive (2) 3-500z/ or (2) 250b's into (8) 3-500z's using heliax into a 8 element 43 foot horizontal antenna. I sat on ch.6 for a long time. This was my fathers equipment. The transformer for the 8 tuber weighed at least 275+ lbs. Took two grown men to carry. One thing was for certain, if you did not have conditions in you favor it did not matter if you had a million watts.

I use to turn on the TramD201 and run it into a texas star modulator talking on the 8 element beams doing about 60 watts and key on a guy that had 1000 watts on a 2 element beam that lived at a lower altitude than me. He kept buying bigger and bigger amplifiers. What a fool.