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Decent Hand Held Control Head CB?

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Smac61

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Feed Provider
Joined
Feb 6, 2003
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29
Location
Warren, MI
Well after all this, I just went with the Anytone Smart Radio. Half the price and at 4x4x1 if I can't make that work, I'm not trying...

20170806173607-d7a7b7cd.jpg
 

DeepBlue

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Joined
Jun 14, 2016
Messages
170
Location
Columbus, Ohio
After checking all the stats, mod possibilities and convenience factor of having everything on the mic "head", I went with an Anytone Apollo 1 from Amazon. Arrived on a Sunday in 2 days. It came in "high Power" mode and set for the 10m Amateur band. I decided to try it on the CB band for monitoring when driving on my trip this summer but also want the FM calling Frequency on 10m (29.600 FM) available. Sadly, these radios operate in the 2x.005 or 2x.000 mode depending on the mod applied and they cannot be adjusted without reworking the physical mod inside the case - unless one adds an external switch, which I may end up doing. The version shown above, sometimes called the Anytone Smart CB has the option of shifting the freq 5 kHz with a particular key press combo. sadly that key combo isn't available on the Apollo 1. I shall have to add a switch.

As a conscientious Amateur op and legal CB op, I am listening to CB and TX-ing on Ham, as allowed by law. So there.

S.
 

iMONITOR

Silent Key
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Joined
Sep 20, 2006
Messages
11,156
Location
S.E. Michigan
I need to put a CB in my new car but have no room for a radio or control head. Does anyone have any experience with any of the following radios:

Cobra 75WX
Uniden CMX560/760
Anytone Apollo 1
Or?

I am well aware of the legalities of running a convert / modified / export radio so please spare me your concerns on that.

What did you decide on and how do you like it? Are you running a base out of your home? It would be nice to have a local contact while in the area.

Bill C.
 

k7ng

Electronics professional
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Aug 31, 2008
Messages
379
Location
CN73
Late input, but my $.02:
I have been installing multiple radios in a fleet of vehicles for a number of years, and a CB radio is one of the necessities. Because of the difficulty of finding a place to put a CB radio where the driver can see it and access the knobs in many new vehicles, I started using the Cobra 75WX-ST about 6 years ago. The average time-in-service of the vehicles the radios go into is 4.5 years.
I have found the average time to radio failure is less than 3 years. Many of the failures are 'soft' failures, such as the radio going silent after a couple hours, or sensitivity drops way off. About 3 years ago Cobra started making the mic hanger button out of a fiber or plastic material instead of metal and now the mic button breaks fairly soon after the radio goes into service. Usually less than a year. The radio must have an external speaker, the audio is horrible out of the tiny speaker in the hand unit (no big surprise there) but the audio still is pretty nasty with the external. But the biggest issue is... the customers hate them. The display is hard to see, the backlighting is uneven and the plastic window clouds up in a few months' use. The customers don't like the way the volume and squelch controls are placed. Nobody said anything until about a year ago, and now the negative feedback is fairly dense. I don't care much for the radio myself. At the time I started getting them they were about the only choice for a hand-controller CB radio.

I got several of the Uniden CMX560's before they were taken off market, and bought a dozen CMX760's after that. I personally like the CMX560 ergonomics a little better than the 760. There is no internal speaker so you must buy an external speaker. The available volume with a reasonable-quality and size speaker is plenty. I have no time-to-failure track record yet, but the customer feedback so far says the CMX560/760 is much better liked, except for one person who can't seem to figure out how to adjust the squelch. I don't like paying more than $150 for a non-SSB CB radio but I would like to have happy customers, and that's worth the $50 difference between the Cobra and the Uniden. The biggest problem I have so far is getting the customers to leave the 'Roger Beep' feature OFF.
 
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