When I was in the squad car and not the 4 wheel drive pickup I usually used, I had a CB and we talked a lot of skip on that also, using the old Motorola CB's that monitored CH 9 and whatever other channel you wanted. (we used 14 at that time almost countywide, some people had CB's but no phones even then). For the CB's we had Antenna specialists permanent mount antennas and for 39.5 a 1/4 wave whip. Good times.
Around 1977, (IIRC), I was a part time Deputy, working a small town in SE MI. I recall our main dispatch was on 39.4600 (simplex), and we had 2 more channels, plus the MSP Post was on 44.8000 out of Romeo MI. Small department, 2 cars, 1 state highway to patrol. Orange County California was on our channel, and ironically same PL tone. Occasionally, when the skip was high between midnight and 6AM, they would have their roll call at 4 or 5AM Eastern (varied). At the end of their roll call we would sometime pop in with "3902 to Orange County, Good morning from (location)." Usually it was met with "Copy 3902 good morning to you too". We would never do that outside of that 6 hour overnight window because if a supervisor heard us, we had to do "some 'splaining". He was ex-Army so it was not fun.
Not to admit to illegal acts or anything but switching the CH 23 crystals around landed us on 26.800 and occasionally (you know for emergency purposes) we seemed to end up there on occasion. Even there, we occasionally got a fair amount of traffic but not the 20-30 db over we had on Ch 21.
We're past the Statute of limitation so... I graduated HS in '72, and hung out with some 'like minded' fellows, and we would mod Lafayette Comstat 23s Mark IV radios, and came up with a design to go down as low as 26.2. Never thought about other users as it "seemed clear" to us, but occasionally we hear something strong locally. Turned out the transmission was FM wide band, (being received in AM mode), and belongs to a local broadcast station who had an RPU link on 26.4100. Hence forth we stayed away from that frequency but used lower frequencies until we discovered the Lafayette 6 meter AM mobile which was cooler to use. I think it was a model HA-750.
To quote Bugs Bunny, "Ain't we a stinker?"
Now with FCC licenses, and legal business band comms, discretion takes the place of having fun.
Side note to this rant .... I really miss stores like Lafayette, Burnstein-Appleby, Olson Electronics, etc. They took our lawn mowing money, and we liked it. (Special nod to Heathkit, and Allied)
