What's In the Numbers ?

[KEWB-N1EXA]

Question.
Getting back into CB after Picking up A Saturn Base for Give Away Price. Besides Covering 25 - 28.3 Mhz it has a Pan Adaptor for SDR too so its become the new toy.

While On 38 LSB and the Afternoon Skip kicks in the DXers Are using 3 Digit Numbers With a Handle or A State ? Does this number represent the last 3 digits of the Zip

code they are in or is this an assigned Club number or or just a random number? If I throw out "740 Massachusetts "for 02740 am I legit or totally wrong ?

Pete N1EXA Former KQX9298

 

[Chronic]

just a made up number , use anything you want !

 

[jonwienke]

LOL at the notion that anyone is assigning call signs or numbers to CB operators. The whole shtick of CB is that everyone pretty much does what they want.

 

[nd5y]

There used to be club assigned numbers but I don't know if that still exists.

 

[KEWB-N1EXA]

Ive Googled it and got nothing. Infact anything on the web about CB is written by 15 year olds living in thier divorced parents ( Mothers)basement with a Fuzzy visions of the 1970s from awful movies of that era.

Pete N1EXA former KQX9282 This time I typed with the boxing gloves off !

 

[slowmover]

My impression is: easy to remember AND gets thru radio hiss.

Choose hard or sharp consonants, IOW. Two-digit or three.

Next week, choose another.

Bye bye bye

 

[kruser]

There used to be club assigned numbers but I don't know if that still exists.

Yep, I remember those days. In my area the numbers were assigned to the locals that could talk with each other when the band was not open.
We had a group of about 100 people all within direct ground wave range of each other. Many of us had huge beam antennas on rotors. Someone in the area did keep a master list of the numbers matched with the users first name and location. Whomever kept that list would pick a number for you or you could use your own number you made up as long as it was not used by another local person. There was absolutely nothing official about it though but it did make it easy to lookup the persons name and location from their number. I was 109 back in those days. The group used one of the sideband modes on channels 36 to 39 and sometimes 40. There were no rules on using upper or lower sideband nor which channel you used. A lot of the people would shoot the bull well into the wee hours of the next morning! I don't think we ever considered ourselves a club.
We also didn't use "handles" like those heard on the AM channels and 19. Our group was actually pretty formal about things.

When the band opened up, another user may have been heard with the number you used. I recall a 'nationwide' list from some DXer's club that tried to maintain a numbered list of users for the times the band was open. I never messed with that and just used the same number I used for local chatter. Of course that was all totally unofficial as well. When the band was open, it was common to hear users saying their number along with their city and state.
Somewhere here I still have an old RadioShack pocket computer or organizer that still has all the local users names, fake numbers and location info from my CB days back in the early 80's I'd guess.
The local group that I was involved with was a fairly technical bunch of guys. That made for some interesting conversations thru the night.
Several of the guys studied and learned code and became licensed for the amateur service. That was back when CW was needed to get a ham license. CB was fun back then as long as you stayed away from channel 19 and some of the other channels with a lot of AM users running horrible amplifiers that splattered all over the band!

It was over 40 years ago when we had our local group. We'd meetup and help each other get antennas and towers installed.
I stopped talking on 11 meters over 30 years ago but I do still tune the channels every now and then. To this day, I'll still hear some of the guys I used to chat with 40 years ago and they are still using the same numbers they used 40 years ago! My antennas are not worth a darn at 11 meters though so I don't hear much and I also don't have a transmitter hooked up.

 

[FPR1981]

Choose something significant to you. I use "4200," spoken as forty-two hundred because I live in county number 42 and work in LE. We identify on our radios as such (42 hundred then your unit number).

 

[KEWB-N1EXA]

Choose something significant to you. I use "4200," spoken as forty-two hundred because I live in county number 42 and work in LE. We identify on our radios as such (42 hundred then your unit number).

Hey FPR1981 Where did you go ? Thinking of that Ham Ticket ?

Ive been Using 740 SE Massachusetts For this latest Venture into CB where I dropped of around 1980 with Good Results.

740 seems to get the DX returns. I even ran into the local group called the Renegades and got "Renegade 740" as a call.

38 LSB seems to be a good Pig Pile early morning or early evening here on the East coast .... Besides the Local 28.490 10 Meter net

Ham has been pretty dead so for for this Solar Cycle Uptick lets hope in the next few years 6 and 10 become hot again.

So far on 11 meters ive gone far as Colorado and Texas and to the east Wales and Doublin and Id say that pretty Good for a

Bare Foot Galaxy Saturn and Silver Rod 5/8 Antenna .

 

[Token]

There used to be club assigned numbers but I don't know if that still exists.

Yes, this was very common up until about the 1990's, when it started to fade out. There are still a few clubs with assigned club numbers, but it is not as common today.

I still hear people running the same numbers today. And I occasionally will throw out those old numbers also.

For those not familiar, a loosely organized CB radio group, call it a club, would keep a roster of members (I am speaking past tense, but it is still done today, just less often). Each member would be assigned a unique number. So the Jelly Bean club (a real club name), might have 1200 members, and each member had the option of using the ID "Jelly Bean XXXX", or "JB XXXX", or simply "XXXX" where XXXX was their member number.

It was also common for the local clubs to hold get-togethers, weekend coffee meetings, etc, sometimes called CB "Breaks". Some clubs held such breaks every weekend, some once a month, some every couple months, etc, depending on the size and activity of the club. In the 70's and 80's there were Breaks any given weekend in most areas. For example, in SoCal (using SoCal as an example, but it was pretty much nation wide) in the early 80's there were, on average, 6 or 8 breaks per weekend (that I knew of, may have been more I was not aware of), so there was always one not too far away if you felt like attending.

During the spring / summer / fall clubs might hold large Jamborees, for example at the Orange County Fairgrounds, the Hemet Fairgrounds, the Kern County Fairgrounds, etc. One club might be the "host" or coordinator, but often it was a couple of clubs working together. There might be thousands, to 10+ thousand, people attending a single weekend Jamboree, with RVs driving in from significant distances. Typically, in SoCal, there was at least one such large Jamboree per month during the season.

At these weekly Breaks, or less frequent Jamborees, people would wear vests or jackets with the CB radio club names, and their numbers, embroidered on them.

T!